Wernher von Braun's Ultimate Weapon

Between 1952 and I954, German-American rocket engineer Wernher von Braun was the key participant in one of the most influential campaigns to promote spaceflight ever attempted, a series of articles in Collier's magazine. Subsequent literature on the history of spaceflight–much of it written by von Braun enthusiasts or influenced by their accounts–has depicted this campaign mostly as a forerunner to later programs for the peaceful and scientific exploration of space. 1

Von Braun was the leader of the team that designed the V-2 ballistic missile for Nazi Germany. After he surrendered to the Allies in spring 1945, the U.S. Army moved him and about 120 subordinates to El Paso, Texas, to form the core of a new rocket group. They were one of the key prizes of “Project Paperclip,” which aimed at transferring German scientific and engineering knowledge to the United States. In 1950, his group moved again to Huntsville, Alabama, where they began work on the nuclear-tipped Redstone missile–essentially a super V-2.

All throughout this odyssey, von Braun had dreamed of space travel, his first love. The centerpiece of his plans, which he had been developing since at least 1945, was a manned space station that would not only serve as a base for further exploration but also as an orbiting reconnaissance platform and battle station for achieving “space superiority” over the Soviet Union. When challenged as to the station's defensibil-ity, von Braun even posited preemptive atomic strikes from space as a response to the development of a hostile antisat-ellite capability. For von Braun, the space station was the ultimate weapon that could impose a pax Americana on the Soviets. He may, in fact, have been the first person to use the term “space superiority” in print.

History remembers NASA's most famous rocket scientist as an advocate of peaceful space exploration.

Wernher von Braun's ultimate weapon

But archival documents reveal the depth of his true Cold War ambition-a military space station that would allow the United States to dominate Earth.

When the age of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and robotic reconnaissance satellites finally arrived, however, von Braun's orbital battle station quickly became a quaint and oft-forgotten relic of the pre-Sputnik age. After the U.S. Army transferred his German-led rocket-engineering organization to NASA in 1960, his focus shifted from weapons to peaceful space exploration. His early Cold War past was sanitized by omission, just as his Nazi one was, since it conflicted with his public image and that of NASA.

Seizing the high ground

Von Braun's conception of the space station as a weapon for dominating Earth had its origin in the works of German-Romanian space visionary Hermann Oberth, whose groundbreaking 1923 treatise, Die Rakete zu den Flanetenraumen (“The Rocket into Interplanetary Space”), launched the spaceflight movement in the German-speaking world. Oberth mentioned reconnaissance from orbit and first broached the idea of a giant mirror, up to 100 kilometers (62 miles) in diameter, that could be used to modify the climate or set fire to enemy ammunition dumps, troop concentrations, and cities.

Aiming high: Von Braun stands in front of the five F-1 engines of the Saturn V launch vehicle.

In 1929, a book called Das Problem der Befahrung des Weltraums: Der Raketenmotor (“The Problem of Space Travel: The Rocket Motor”) appeared under the mysterious pseudonym Hermann Noordung–who was actually Hermann Potonik, a former Austro-Hungarian military officer. His book offered no new military ideas beyond Oberth's, but it did provide an elaborate description of an inflatable, wheel-shaped space station that used a solar concentrator mirror to generate electricity. Although no explicit evidence exists that the then-17-year-old von Braun had read Noordung's book, in 1929 or 1930 he wrote a plotless short story, “Lu-netta,” about a trip to a space station that sounds very much like Noordung's. Moreover, the similarity between von Braun's post-World War II space stations and that of Noordung is too great to be coincidental.

After von Braun surrendered, the 3 3-year-old wunderkind had his first chance in many years to formulate his space ideas on paper. His “Survey of the Development of Liquid Rockets in Germany and Their Future Prospects,” written for two British interrogators in May 1945, was breathtaking in its audacity, discussing everything from intercontinental missiles to interplanetary expeditions. Several months later, von Braun was sitting in Fort Bliss near El Paso, tasked with facilitating the transfer of V-2 technology to the United States and developing a new rocket-boosted, ramjet-powered cruise missile. When the U.S. Army asked his opinion about the threat from the Soviet Union in 1946, not surprisingly, he played it up, suggesting the development of large, multistage rockets as missiles and space boosters: “Facing the existence of the atomic bomb and the fact that such a circling rocket represents an ever-present threat above the head of almost every nation, that nation which first reaches this goal possesses an overwhelming military superiority over other nations.” 2

Absorbing the democratic culture and political traditions of the United States, von Braun saw that he had to convince ordinary Americans of the feasibility of space travel, his obsession, before their leaders might take him seriously. In 1947, he decided to present an elaborate spaceflight feasibility study in the form of a science-fiction novel: a fully worked-out expedition to Mars. The choice of the red planet shows how far ahead he was. He thought it was too easy to prove that humans could land on the moon with extrapolations of existing technology. Even space advocates viewed Mars and interplanetary travel as only a distant future possibility–and even then, only if atomic rockets could somehow be perfected. The calculations that undergirded his novel, The Mars Project, were done in his spare time with no other tools than a slide rule. He optimistically estimated the total cost of the enterprise at $2 billion, roughly equivalent to the Manhattan Project.

In his novel, the United Space Forces have to appeal for money for the Mars expedition to the president and congress of the United States of Earth in the world capital of Greenwich, Connecticut; it was von Braun's projection of the American system over the whole globe. How the planet got to that state is outlined in The Mars Project's fascinating prologue, “AD. 1980”: “The final catastrophic conflict was over. The great Eastern Bloc, after five of the most frightful years in the history of the world, had finally succumbed to the last despairing blows of the almost exhausted Western Powers. Of the great Asiatic mass had become a group of smaller states, slowly digging out from under the ruins of the war.” The key to victory in “the dread winter of 1974-1975” had been the space station “Lunetta”–the name he still treasured from his teenage short story. It had served as a battle station, dropping atomic missiles on Soviet industrial and military facilities. 3

This piece of Cold War wishful thinking was rooted in his conservative anti-Communism, which had only been strengthened by the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, the Berlin Blockade, and the ordeals his parents and other relatives suffered at Communist hands. The end of World War II had forced him to abandon the German nationalist parts of the conservative worldview he had inherited from his father, but he remained conservative by instinct and easily transferred his allegiance to the United States as the “bulwark” of Western culture.

Interestingly, while von Braun could be a visionary in technologies he really cared about, for others he was as shortsighted as anyone else. He did not foresee the escalating, destructive power of thermonuclear weapons. Nor did he anticipate the age of ICBMs. The then-conventional wisdom in the U.S. military was that long-range ballistic missiles would be very inaccurate and, at any rate, no technology yet existed for getting ballistic warheads through the heat of reentry at the velocities needed for ranges greater than several hundred miles. As a result, the competing military services emphasized the development of cruise missiles (essentially unmanned, one-way turbojet or ramjet-powered bombers) as an alternative to conventional bombers.

Von Braun thought Soviet air defenses would defeat those threats, but as he later explained, his orbital nuclear missiles would glide hyper-sonically half way around Earth on wings and would be guided from an orbiting platform situated 3,700 kilometers (2,400 miles) ahead of the main station to keep the impact point of the missile in the line of sight. 4

Early in 1950, the Defense Department cleared his novel for publication since his military space ideas were deemed too futuristic to infringe on classified matters. But his attempt to sell The Mars Project to a publisher that year–just as the army moved his missile group to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville–was a distressing failure because of his novel's wooden characters and their tendency to make long-winded explanations of scientific principles. About 18 U.S. publishing houses rejected his tome.

Just before moving, von Braun had given his first high-profile speech in the United States at an air-force-sponsored academic conference on space medicine held in Chicago on March 3, 1950. His lecture became his first U.S. publication, “Multi-Stage Rockets and Artificial Satellites,” when the conference proceedings came out in August 1951. After explicating the basic principles of the rocket and spaceflight, von Braun described a three-stage launch vehicle and a space station, in a much more explicit way than any earlier proposal, and illustrated it for the first time.

He began with its uses “as an observation station for both military and civilian purposes,” and as a base for space astronomy, but went on to present the geostrategic argument to the wider public for the first time: “Our space station could be utilized as a very effective bomb carrier, and for all present-day means of defense, a non-interceptible one.” In a near-polar orbit at an altitude of 1,730 kilometers (1,075 miles), the station would circle Earth every two hours and cover all parts of the globe every twenty-four hours, leading to “military omnipresence.” He noted, “The political situation being what it is, with the Earth divided into a Western and an Eastern camp, I am convinced that such a station will be the inevitable result of the present race of armaments.” 5

After his lecture was published, this argument and the illustration made it into Popular Science and rather overshadowed his closing discussion of the station as a jumping-off point to the moon and the planets. According to the publisher, University of Illinois Press, the book sold extremely well for an academic work and generated “tremendous publicity all over the U.S. in the daily newspapers.” 6

Celebrity status

Shortly after his speech appeared in print, the air force sponsored another conference, “Medicine and Physics of the Upper Atmosphere,” in San Antonio in November 1951. Von Braun was not invited to speak but did attend the first day or two, and it was there he met Collier's magazine writer and editor Cornelius Ryan, who later became famous for his World War II books such as The Longest Day. The magazine had sent Ryan after the Hayden Planetarium's First Annual Symposium on Space Travel in October 1951, convinced that there might be a hot issue in the feasibility of spaceflight, a topic many people still regarded as Utopian or silly. Von Braun, assisted by two prominent scientists, Fred Whipple and Joseph Kaplan, was able to sell Ryan on the idea, leading to the first Collier's space issue, cover date March 22, 1952, with contributions from German emigre science writer Willy Ley, air force aerospace physician Heinz Haber, U.N. lawyer Oscar Schachter, von Braun, Whipple, and Kaplan. Ches-ley Bonestell, Fred Freeman, and Rolf Klep were the artists and illustrators.

The Collier's issue was spectacularly bold, with a beautiful Bonestell painting of von Braun's winged third-stage rocket on the cover, separating from its second stage at dawn high over the Pacific Ocean. In the upper-right corner was the teaser: “Man Will Conquer Space Soon: Top Scientists Tell How in 15 Startling Pages.” Inside, the space section opened with an editorial, “What Are We Waiting For?” followed by the feature piece, von Braun's “Crossing the Last Frontier.”

Space exploration and science certainly played a part in this Collier's issue, but the predominant argument was von Braun's militant Cold “War claim for the space station as superweapon. His essay opened: “Within the next 10 or 15 years, the Earth will have a new companion in the skies, a man-made satellite that could be either the greatest force for peace ever devised, or one of the most terrible weapons of war–depending on who makes and controls it.” The magazine's editorial made his argument even more explicit. A new Manhattan Project was needed, an estimated $4-billion expenditure to dominate space: “The U.S. must immediately embark on a long-range development program to secure for the West ‘space superiority.’ If we do not, somebody else will. That somebody else very probably would be the Soviet Union.”

Von Braun's speeches and media appearances in New York and Washington sounded the same hardline theme. At the same time, Collier's publicity director Seth Moseley prepared a major press release, 2,800 press and radio kits to be handed out by sales representatives, window displays on Fifth Avenue in New York and in downtown Philadelphia, and a flood of copies to be sent to senators, congressmen, and other influential people. The culmination of von Braun's media campaign came on March 19, 1952, when he gave the lecture “Let's Tackle the Space Ship” for the American Rocket Society (ARS), the professional organization of rocket engineers. Held at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in suburban White Oak, Maryland, von Braun's appearance caused an enormous traffic jam. Three thousand cars had to be turned away, and five thousand people heard the lecture, many over loudspeakers outside the hall. Afterwards, his mailbox was flooded with letters from enthusiastic children and adults, and from crackpots of all kinds. How many of these people were convinced by von Braun's Cold “War argument, and how many were simply excited about the idea of space travel is a good question, but the Korean War period was the apogee of the anti-Communist fear, and, as historian H. Bruce Franklin has pointed out, the idea of the superweapon had long intrigued the American imagination.

The most exciting, but strictly secret, by-product of the Collier's issue was “the A.V. Grosse action,” as von Braun dubbed it. Aristid V. Grosse, president of the Temple University Research Institute in Philadelphia, was a German-trained atomic chemist and member of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's first committee to investigate the atomic bomb. He was also a friend of President Harry S. Truman's personal physician. The March 22 Collier's spurred Grosse to ask the doctor if he could query Truman about the need to investigate the space station and the possible Soviet threat. The beleaguered president, whose poll numbers were terrible because of the Korean stalemate, apparent corruption in his administration, and rampant McCarthyism, had just announced that he would not run again. According to Grosse, Truman said: “Sure, Wallie [the physician's nickname] you go ahead and have him write a report for me.” 7 After making arrangements through senior army channels, Grosse then traveled to Huntsville in April to meet von Braun. The two immediately hit it off; von Braun found the visit “inspiring.” 8

Grosse had some intriguing ideas of his own about what the space project might be; he envisioned robotic vehicles and the possibility of influencing the anti-Communist struggle in Asia with a satellite he called the “American Star,” which could be a visible symbol of U.S. prowess, or perhaps even broadcast propaganda or jam signals from Soviet transmitters.

As von Braun told Grosse in a long June 21, 1952, letter, they agreed that the beginning step was to form a committee of influential scientists and engineers and try to get several million government dollars for a study of programs and launch vehicles. Von Braun explained: “It has been my experience that it is much simpler to sell a project which eases the burden of responsibility on men in the top echelons, than a project which puts an additional burden on their shoulders… to ask for a few millions to be invested in a modest program for the purpose of evaluating a new idea in the field of military science which is virtually ‘pregnant’ with dreadful potentialities and could easily bring unpleasant surprises if some day a potential enemy should be discovered to have reached an orbit first–isn't this really easing the burden [of] responsibility of policy makers, high-ranking officers and statesmen?” 9

On September 17, von Braun's campaign for a nuclear-armed space station reached its high watermark when he spoke before a blue-ribbon Washington audience on “Space Superiority As a Means for Achieving World Peace.” Dismissing the possibility of adversaries developing accurate, vertically launched nuclear missiles that could strike his space station, he expected that the only real threat could come from armed, piloted space planes. His answer was radical: “The space station can destroy with absolute certainty an enemy spacecraft prior to its launching. But far better would be if we can say to the enemy a determined, power-packed ‘NO’ when he is beginning his development of manned spacecraft! And still better if we can forestall his building of ground installations. I believe there is still time for us to accomplish this, and I urge that it be done!” 10 In essence, he hoped threats would work, but he advocated preemptive strikes as the last resort to protect the station's dominance of the skies.

Using the Manhattan Project and the V-2 as examples of radical technological leaps that were not ahead of their time, von Braun appealed to his elite audience for a $4-billion, 10-year commitment to develop this ultimate weapon to enforce a pax Americana on Earth. The air force's strategic bombers were doomed to failure in the face of the rapid development of Soviet jet fighters, he argued, but if his launch vehicle and station system were developed before the Soviet ones, they would have no countermeasures.

Von Braun told Grosse after his speech that he had made one clear convert, Juan Trippe, the famous head of Pan-American Airways. But it was hard to tell what the impact of “space superiority” might be. After Dwight D. Eisenhower's election as president on November 4, 1952, Grosse wrote him: “I have been busy on our problem since the elections, and have had some important discussions. Wise men, however, advise me to go slow for the next two months.” 11

In fact, Grosse found that he had little or no influence in the new Republican administration. Eisenhower pushed through his “New Look” strategy of cutting back conventional forces, including the regular army, in favor of more emphasis on strategic nuclear weapons, primarily in the air force. At the same time, he replaced the Defense Department's committee-ridden and often ineffectual Research and Development Board–which was supposed to coordinate the competing efforts of the services–with the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Development. It was probably because of this reorganization that Grosse did not finish the report originally intended for Truman until August 25, 1953, and only sent it to the new assistant secretary, Donald Quarles, a month later. His “Report on the Present Status of the Satellite Problem” discussed unmanned satellites as psychological weapons and possible scientific or reconnaissance vehicles while explicitly leaving aside manned space stations as much more expensive and further in the future. It is unknown whether the Grosse report had any impact on Eisenhower's 1955 decision to launch a scientific satellite as a covert means for establishing the principle of “overflight” by reconnaissance satellites over the USSR. Still, it seems likely that it was one of the documents, along with several more important Rand Corporation studies, that helped prepare for the 1955 decision inside classified circles.

While all due credit must be given to von Braun as a groundbreaking rocket engineer and space visionary, space historians and enthusiasts must remember the undeniable fact that he crusaded for a militant anti-Communist policy of nuclear bombs in space.

Von Braun, meanwhile, continued his campaign for the military space station, as politically naive as ever about the likelihood of selling such a multi-billion-dollar, pie-in-the-sky idea to the administration. His “space superiority” speech appeared in the March/April 1953 issue of Ordnance, a publication closely associated with his employer, the Army Ordnance Corps, although it ended with the usual disclaimer that it only represented his views and not that of the army or the Defense Department. Ordnance edited out one paragraph that dismissed the air force's B-36 intercontinental bomber as vulnerable to Soviet jet fighters and future anti-aircraft missiles, no doubt because of the trouble it would have caused between the services.

Criticism of von Braun's space proposals also grew inside the ARS. At the Second Hayden Space Travel Symposium in October 1952, Milton Rosen of the Naval Research Laboratory argued that von Braun's giant launch vehicle and space station were based on very optimistic numbers and would lead to a diversion of resources that would damage all existing guided-missile programs, and thus U.S. national security as a whole. Rosen's critique hit a nerve in part because of the way the ARS had minimized spaceflight since the mid-1930s to achieve respectability, and in part because of the way Collier's had presented von Braun's proposals as flat-out assertions with all qualifiers removed and with no discussion of intermediate steps. Military security prevented von Braun from talking about how the 175-mile-range Redstone ballistic missile he was developing in Huntsville, or other rockets, might be adapted to launch a small satellite, although he or Grosse did mention the “American Star” idea to Time magazine. That publication devoted an unprecedented cover issue to space on December 8, 1952, playing up the Rosen-von Braun controversy and quoting an anonymous “important missile expert” who accused the German engineer of “trying to sell the U.S. a space flight project disguised as a means of dominating the world.”

Von Braun's orbital battle station gradually faded away in 1953 and 1954, in part because the Collier's issues on the moon, followed by ones on astronaut training (February-March 1953), an unmanned satellite with monkeys (June 1953), and a Mars expedition based on The Mars Project (April 1954)–all with von Braun's participation or explicit byline–tended to overshadow the first issue, with its Cold War emphasis. The focus shifted by default to the scientific and engineering problems of space exploration. This trend would be reinforced in 1955, when von Braun appeared in two high-profile Disney TV programs on space travel that avoided military topics except reconnaissance.

Changing times

By the mid-1950s, the nuclear arms race was already rapidly changing. Concerned by Soviet progress in rocketry, Eisenhower and his Defense officials decided in 1953 and 1954 to put urgent priority on the air force Atlas ICBM rather than on expensive and speculative programs like the space station. Breakthroughs in guidance and in the size and power of thermonuclear warheads promised a blockbuster weapon that, if not very accurate, was certainly capable of holding Soviet cities hostage. Heavy, blunt-end, “heat sink” warheads would get the bombs through the atmosphere; lighter “ablative” heat shields came a bit later, thanks in significant part to the Huntsville group. In late 1955, von Braun's organization was tasked with developing an intermediate-range, 1,500-nautical-mile ballistic missile, Jupiter, for the army and navy in competition with the air force's Thor, which would be based on Atlas. Jupiter provided the funds for Huntsville to experiment with ablation, an important technological breakthrough. But remarkable again is von Braun's failure to foresee the imminent arrival of this world of ICBMs, which would make orbital bombs a poor second choice, stuck as they were in predictable paths that would only pass over targets once or twice a day.

After the Sputnik shock in 1957, von Braun continued to push for space superiority, expecting that the Cold War arms race would be extended into orbit and even to the moon. Although he finally conceded that space stations were vulnerable to enemy attack, he still argued for the superior accuracy of orbital nuclear bombs as late as mid-195 8. The weaponization of space soon faded, however, as the two superpowers decided that it was not in their mutual interest to put bombs in orbit or to threaten each other's military reconnaissance, navigation, and communication satellites too explicitly–although at times each side did develop limited anti-satellite capabilities.

And thus the nuclear-armed space station quickly became forgotten. After von Braun joined NASA in 1960, the idea was positively at odds with the agency's mission of peaceful space exploration. He and his associates, who wrote many of the early histories of spaceflight, remembered the Collier's series, if they remembered it at all, only as a precursor to NASA's space station, moon, and Mars programs. Just as was the case with von Braun's National Socialist past, the easiest solution was simply to omit inconvenient facts. Von Braun's rotating, wheeled space station had become iconic, yet his primary argument for building it effectively disappeared from the record.

Only gradually, as space history became more professionalized starting in the 1980s, did scholars begin to read von Braun's articles from the early 1950s for themselves and notice both the cultural impact of the Collier's series and the Cold War arguments embedded in them. While all due credit must be given to von Braun as a groundbreaking rocket engineer and space visionary, space historians and enthusiasts must remember the undeniable fact that he crusaded for a militant anti-Communist policy of nuclear bombs in space, with preemptive strikes on the Soviet Union as a last resort to protect his space station's dominance of Earth.

Nor, it may be added, do his military space ideas seem as irrelevant today as they did in the 1960s and 1970s. Just as in the heyday of the Strategic Defense Initiative in the mid-1980s, the weaponization of space is back on the agenda. Members of the second Bush administration and military space advocates have asserted the need to dominate the “high ground” of orbit with armed satellites to protect U.S. space assets and assure U.S. hegemony. Barring an explicit international treaty that bans all weapons from space, not just the “weapons of mass destruction” outlawed by the U.N. Outer Space Treaty of 1967, von Braun's space superiority concept will remain an issue of great importance, even though his specific proposals have faded into history.

FOR NOTES, PLEASE SEE P. 78.

FROM OUR ARCHIVES:

Wernhervon Braun

Although Wernher von Braun was a visionary in the field of space travel, he failed to foresee how the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles would render his concept for a military space station obsolete. Ironically, in 1962, von Braun coauthored an essay in the Bulletin, in which he chided his scientific colleagues for their lack of imagination:

“We wonder why it is that scientists in particular and humanity in general were utterly incapable of predicting, only a few years before Sputnik 1, the inevitable and almost immediate advent of the greatest epoch in the history of mankind. In 1941, for example, only a handful of individuals could have predicted that within 20 years a human being would succeed in orbiting his native planet in a space vehicle. Worse still, in 1950 hardly a man could be found in any walk of life who really believed that artificial satellites would become commonplace in less than a decade.

Perhaps we should not be surprised at our failure to predict the advent of the space age, for we were already adept at this sort of thing when we were unable to recognize the significance of the nuclear age less than 20 years earlier.”

‘Astronautical Fallout,’ by Wernher von Braun and Frederick I. Ordway, III, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, November 1962.