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Aviation History
1963
1963 - 0256.PDF
244 FLIGHT International, 14 February 196: Missiles and Spaceflight each submarine as soon as it is found, and to wait until missiles start breaking the surface is to invite disaster. This is why inability to verify strike readiness of the RN Polaris force in a sudden crisis may rob us of our resolution. Much closer study of the contingency in which Britain has to act alone is due. The US may conceivably be politically neutral on the issue in question, but militarily she cannot be; if any kind of nuclear exchange starts she faces the immediate prospect of involve ment. If she disagrees with our assessment, and believes we are exaggerating die threat to our security, she must regard us as temporarily a danger to her own security; and she will restrain us, as hitherto. Positions of our submarines will be known to her through the joint command structure. Simply by applying normal ASW pursuit procedures, she could make it difficult for our Po laris ships to listen for radio communications, and probably impos sible for them to fire. In practice she would obviously take any measures necessary to ensure they did not trigger-off global nuclear conflict. At an earlier stage in Britain's defence programme, Blue Streak became a fiasco because there had been insufficiently rigorous study of the conditions that would prevail when it became opera tional. There is a strong case for believing that the same thing is happening with Polaris. It is an ideal weapon—deployed in the quantity and as part of the joint striking power which the US commands. Its vulnerabilities and limitations are compensated for by Minuteman, Titan, Atlas and other strategic weapon deploy ments, and by the early-warning capabilities of the United States' communications and surveillance services, in which satellites play a major role. We are attemping to run the fleet ballistic-missile system divorced from all this. We are asking it to carry the complete responsibility of deterrence. And we are doing so with the dangerously marginal number of four or five submarines. The fundamental problem is that we are aping American and Soviet power with very much smaller total economic resources, while allotting a smaller proportion of these resources to defence, and from a position of steadily increasing technological inferiority. We are now entirely dependent on the US for the technology of our deterrent. We have to choose from what the US is prepared to offer. The weapons she develops are those suited to her own fun damentally different strategic situation. She cancelled Skybolt because it no longer answered her needs, not because it had any technical shortcoming. But there is a strong case that, for Britain, Skybolt was, and is, preferable to Polaris. Only four or five units of dispersal is a telling criticism of the British Polaris; and, while secrecy is the strength of missile sub marines, it is the Achilles heel also. Skybolt would avoid this entirely. It is more vulnerable to surprise attack on the ground, but airborne alert is the answer to that—perhaps in conjunction with an improved V-bomber. If the Prime Minister had only taken time to consider President Kennedy's Nassau alternatives, he might have recognized deeper issues in this crucial decision. Britain has got to do her own defence thinking for herself. But we have settled for Polaris. This weapon will not be a credible deterrent in our hands until we decide to build four times as many submarines. One way or the other, the expense is going to make all the defence money wasted in the past look trivial. We should not grumble at this; major increases in defence expenditure are overdue; but we have got to get the programmes right. No nation can afford a succession of fiascos. where "the greatest chance of finding life soon" exists. The exo biological programme should include: (1) development of a micro phone for detecting "macro-life" on Mars in advance of manned landings; (2) preparation of biological and biochemical experiment; (for detecting "micro-life") to be carried on the first impact probes to the Moon and planets, because of the risk of contamination from Earth-forms; samples of the Moon material first collected by Sur veyor/Prospector should be sealed off and cached for experimental use when circumstances enable it to be collected for laboratory tests; (3) obtaining international agreement to maintain Mars as a "biological preserve"; (4) strict procedures to avoid contamination of the lunar surface by human wastes; (5) quarantine arrangements for all astronauts, samples and spacecraft returning from inter planetary missions, to avoid "back contamination" to Earth-life from destructive alien organisms picked up during the mission; (6) serious attempts at the biological exploration of interplanetary space, beginning with sample collection (of meteoritic material) from X-15 flights above 50 miles' altitude, and by recoverable satellites. To speed up the exo-biology programme and other scientific research, NASA is urged to take immediate steps to train scientists to work aboard spacecraft and at extra-terrestrial stations, in particular: (1) a scientist-astronaut should be a crew-member of each Apollo lunar mission; (2) biologists should be available for the first manned flights to Mars; (3) meteorologists should co pilot manned orbiting laboratories, beginning with the 1964 two- man Gemini flights, and use orbiting time for conducting special- lized studies; (4) astronomers should be trained for the advent of space observatories, to maintain and modify the key astronomi cal instruments aboard. Advanced technological devices now coming within engineering scope should be developed to assist the scientist-astronaut. It is foreseen that, the adaptive machine or "telepuppet," primitive versions of which are already used in handling radio-active materials, have a key role in space missions. It is anticipated that telepuppets should accompany man in orbit and to the Moon, precede him to Mars, and stand-in for him on Venus, Jupiter, Mercury and other hostile environments. They should be able to operate either re motely controlled or independently, to carry out set tasks with a substantial degree of built-in flexibility to guard against any change in conditions or a failure of human command. Another necessary piece of ancillary equipment recommended by the report for speedy development is a robot lunar-travel vehicle. A test vehicle needs to be developed and given trials under simu lated lunar conditions, and possibly on the Moon itself, to yield answers well in advance of manned landings. This experience can then be used for the operational man-carrying design, which will be a necessary adjunct to lunar exploration if foot-slogging in a space-suit there proves as awkward as is suspected. ICBM Decoy Contract Geophysics Corporation of America has received a contract for more than $500,000 from the Air Force Systems Command to study new optical techniques which might be used to discriminate between real and decoy ballistic missile warheads fired against the United States. Dr Milton Greenberg, GCA president, states that preliminary classified studies are already under way at the company's Physics Research Division in Bedford. Experimental work will be performed at the Air Force Arnold Engineering Development Center in Tennessee. The studies are being conducted for Project Defender, the broad Defense Department research programme under overall management of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) which is aimed at developing advanced ICBM defence systems. NEW SPACE TARGETS FOR NASA? Recently a panel of independent scientists was invited to evaluate the NASA programme, and was given the fullest facilities to do so. One hundred senior American research men spent two months under the chairmanship of Dr J. Van Allen (of radiation-belt fame) on the task, and their 577-page report A Review of Space Research has now been published by the National Academy of Sciences. While it "enthusiastically endorses" NASA's efforts, it recommends radical reallocations of emphasis, both in the objects to be pursued and the means of pursuing them. Top priority, it recommends, should go to the search for life beyond the Earth, with every possible effort focused on Mars, SPACEFLIGHT REPORT One of the most engaging sidelights of the 1961 annual meeting of the American Rocket Society in New York was the sight of Dr Jerry Grey of Princeton covering sheets of paper with long, tech nical words for the benefit of the accompanying cigar-chewing stenographer nonchalantly tapping the keys of his shorthand machine throughout four "Space Flight Report to the Nation" discussion sessions. Or so it seemed to a visiting reporter a few seats away, whose discussion-recording system was limited to a pencil and notebook. The end-product of the process which began in this way in the New York Coliseum is the book Space Flight Report to the
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