A half-century ago I spent hundreds of hours in an underground bunker in the Sacramento valley watching a television image of a large, steel bread mixer in a nearby building. I used the console in front of me to change the speed and direction of the mixer from time to time, or turn it off. The bunker, and several others like it, was not far from where John Sutter first discovered gold in California in 1849. I was there because my ancestors emigrated from Europe to the valley in the 1850’s, and the family never left. They were aware of the gold rush, but instead of mining, opened up merchandise stores. I grew up there in the 1940s and 50s, went to college in the valley, and got a job in that bunker after graduating from college in 1962.
After watching the mixer for a while on the screen, I noted the time and turned it off, walked to the adjacent building and scraped down the inside walls of the mixer with a copper spatula. The copper contained a small amount of beryllium so the spatula wouldn’t spark when it touched the mixer walls. A spark could easily destroy the whole building and end my life. I went back to the console, turned the mixer on, sat down, and again kept my eye on the television image. I would repeat this several times during the afternoon, and many afternoons to follow.
The mixer didn’t contain bread dough. Churning between the blades was a gray, viscous mass that looked like wet cement, a 60 pound batch of experimental rocket propellant. It was a combination of aluminum powder, an oxidizer, a viscous polymer binder and other ingredients. After thorough mixing, it would be cured in ovens to become a rubbery, flexible, solid, the stuff that could propel missiles topped with satellites or nuclear weapons. I would mix many experimental batches like this one, searching for the best combination of ingredients.
Each morning I would get up around 5:30 a.m., put on a white shirt and tie, and drive the short distance to the plant to begin my workday as a propellant development chemist. We were often in “crash” mode, working rapidly to generate new formulations, competing with other companies for contracts with the federal government. The cold war was at its most intense and the space race had begun only a few years earlier when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first successful earth orbiting satellite.
About 34,000 people were employed at Aerojet in 1962, and the complex had its own airport, road system, and a variety of support facilities. It was called the “General Motors of U.S. Rocketry” by Time magazine; we worked on the Polaris and Minuteman missiles among other projects. Revenue was over half a billion dollars that year. It was one of a number of large companies subsisting on contracts from the military to build rockets and propellant systems for launching missiles and other spacecraft. All of us working there were, in part, caught up in what Dwight Eisenhower called the military industrial complex. In 1961, the year before I was hired, he said:
“We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.”
I was 22 years old, needed a job and was quickly swept up in this evolving industry. My starting salary was $9,500 a year, a very large sum for me then in 1962. I didn’t think deeply about the politics and history that led the nation to spend so much wealth to create these missiles. I was amazed at the vast size of the enterprise, but at the time believed in a strategy known as mutually assured destruction, or MAD, a doctrine in which the potential full-scale use of nuclear weapons by two opposing sides, effectively resulting in the destruction of both, would supposedly keep each side safe. Neither would launch an attack in order to avoid their own worst possible outcome – nuclear annihilation. So perhaps my very small contribution kept the country safe, I thought. But the story of nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them is not yet over. And fifty years later, I don’t feel quite the same way.
There were many beneficial scientific developments and outcomes from these early efforts to design rockets and rocket propellant (both solid and liquid,) including the manned mission to the moon, orbiting communications satellites, the space station, the Hubble space telescope, the space shuttle, unmanned planetary missions and much, much more. The technological advances resulting from satellites launched by rockets are too numerous to even list, and Aerojet played a valuable and significant role in many of these.
In the early 60’s, a major focus of government funding was missile defense – including the Polaris (submarine based) and Minuteman (land based) missiles, as well as antiballistic missiles like the Sprint. I worked on solid propellants for all of these projects in those early days. Solid propellant was critically important because missiles in silos and submarines must be stored for long periods. Liquid propellants can’t be used in such environments. Eventually Polaris was replaced with newer submarine versions: Poseidon, beginning in 1972 and in the 1980s by Trident I. Advanced versions of the Minuteman remain the nation’s only land based missile system.
On October 22, 1962 while I was in a bunker mixing an experimental batch, a colleague came in and told me President Kennedy was going on television to address the nation. It was in that speech I first heard the Soviet Union had erected medium range ballistic missiles in Cuba, and that the United States, among many other activities, was blockading the island.
“It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”
Russian ships with crews and materials necessary to operate the missiles were sailing toward Cuba at the time of Kennedy’s speech. They would be stopped by the blockade. The Cuban missile crisis had been brewing a few weeks before that time, but that day in October, it came to its most dangerous point. We were clearly very close to an all out nuclear war. Most of us then, for a short time during the crisis, thought very carefully about what we were doing and what the ramifications would be if the worst happened. Some employees sent their families from the city to the countryside. We were perhaps closer to the reality of a potential disaster than most Americans.
After this episode ended I first began to think more deeply about my job, not only the ramifications of an actual nuclear exchange, but also a more direct awareness of personal risk. Safety procedures at the plant were stringent and there were very few accidents. Nevertheless, earlier in the month I had seen the results of a small explosion from a one-pound batch of propellant, similar to many I also had mixed. Images of the wounded man and the ambulance still remain in my mind. Explosion of a sixty pound batch in a sealed mixer would completely destroy the building and anyone near it. Other larger explosions had occurred in other companies in the United States and around the world, some with many deaths. Rocket propellant is a hazardous material.
Then I had an accident casting propellant in a vacuum. I built the top of the chamber with thick, clear, plastic Lucite so I could see to direct the mix. There must have been a defect in the Lucite, because when the pressure inside the chamber got very low, it gave way with a very loud bang, as pieces imploded into the chamber, and into the viscous propellant. My brain interpreted it as a propellant detonation, and my heart rate jumped high enough to make my head pound and my ears ring. I was momentarily deaf. In a second I knew it was just the collapse of the chamber as I realized there was no other damage, but it took five minutes before my heart rate returned to normal. My ears continued to ring for several days afterwards and my hearing was permanently damaged.
I decided soon after this incident to leave. In 1964 I returned to graduate school, got a degree, and eventually a job at an academic institution where I had to obtain research money to succeed professionally and to fund my graduate students. I wrote research proposals to many different private and government organizations over the years to do this. In the early years a significant portion of my funding came from military sources, which was easier to obtain than funds from non-military institutions. Considering the nature of the world and the risks we must guard against, I understood the need for this kind of work and respected the individuals and institutions that did it. But my awareness of the implications continued to grow and over the years, I became more uneasy.
I asked myself whether MAD was still relevant? If all adversarial nations have equal numbers of nuclear weapons and missiles, will this keep the world safe from a nuclear disaster? Maybe when there were just two it did. The Soviet Union and the United States came to the brink of nuclear war in 1962, but pulled back. But does mutually assured destruction as a strategy work now in 2009? Tensions between the superpowers have dramatically diminished since the cold war. But the number of missiles and nuclear weapons is still very large in both Russia and the United States, as well as in China.
In the 21st century fear of a nuclear attack has prompted more and more countries to seek both nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them as deterrents to attack from others – a version of the MAD strategy. The list continues to grow and now includes England, France, and China, as well as Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea and soon, perhaps, Iran. The proliferation itself creates a substantial and growing risk. The weapons, both rockets and nuclear technology, may continue to proliferate and eventually be available to groups of people without countries, as the security necessary to control the rapidly growing number of weapons breaks down. North Korea, which obtained its nuclear technology from Pakistan, has recently held secret meetings with officials in Myanmar, one of the world’s poorest nations, presumably to help it develop nuclear weapons. North Korea also provided Syria with materials to begin a nuclear program. And Israel, having already bombed Iraq (1982) and Syria (2007) to remove their developing nuclear weapons technology, is ready to do the same again to Iran within the next year or so. The United States has been drawn into a long and costly war with no easily determined end. One of the reasons, we were told, was to destroy nuclear weapons technology (weapons of mass destruction in Iraq) which turned out not to be there. Reverberations of the Cuban missile crisis can be heard again. President Dmitry Medvedev has warned that Russia will deploy short-range missiles near Poland to counter U.S. military plans in Eastern Europe.
Do these policies and actions make the world, or any single country, a safer place? We presume that having missiles and nuclear weapons protect us, but as proliferation increases, we may become less safe. Missiles may no longer be needed to deliver nuclear weapons to a target. The old MAD strategy presumes all nations that develop nuclear weapons behave according to the logic of MAD. It also presumes that all nations with the ability to launch nuclear weapons care about the survival of their subjects and that nations, not isolated groups, will use nuclear weapons. Today, these presumptions are most likely incorrect.
On September 11, 2001 the country was attacked, not with missiles or nuclear weapons, but with our own commercial airplanes, and I’m asking questions that I didn’t ask at age 22 when I was mixing rocket propellant in that bunker in the California valley. Total world spending on military effort in 2006 was $1.6 trillion dollars. Nearly half of this total, 529 billion, was spent by the United States.
*Is the concept of mutually assured destruction in any way relevant in today’s world?
*If so, how?
*Are we safer now than we were in 1962 or are we less safe?
*Will the unintended proliferation of nuclear weapons contribute, eventually, to their use?
*Might this proliferation be one of the consequences of the military industrial complex that Eisenhower warned about in 1961?
In April of 1967, six years after Eisenhower spoke, Martin Luther King said “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
US military spending per year is now about $711 billion dollars, plus another $200 billion for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Compare this to the yearly expenditures of $38 billion for k-12 education, $19 billion for humanitarian foreign aid, $6.8 billion for children’s health care, $6 billion for job training and $1.3 billion to reduce our dependence on oil.
What do you think?