FROM LONDON TO SPACE WAR / GEOPOLITICAL FUTURES

From London to Space War

By George Friedman


From the beginning, mankind’s presence in space had to do with war.

In World War II, humanity went beyond the Earth’s atmosphere in order to kill. The first rocket that passed out of the Earth’s atmosphere was neither American nor Soviet but rather the German V-2.

It was the first combat missile and had a maximum speed of over 3,000 miles per hour. (The V-1 rocket – basically what is today called a cruise missile – had an air-breathing engine and traveled at a speed of about 350 miles per hour, slower than most World War II fighters. It could, therefore, be shot down if detected by radar.)

The V-2 was powered by liquid fuel – alcohol mixed with liquid oxygen for combustion. It had limited guidance and tended to fly on a trajectory that took it out of the atmosphere and back. The first V-2s hit London, when they hit anything at all, since they had a high failure rate between launch and impact.

It had a warhead weighing 2,200 pounds – about half the payload of a B-17 – but with the explosion being concentrated, it did not distribute the blast efficiently. Nevertheless, it devastated whatever it hit. Adding to the terror, the V-2 hit after it ran out of fuel and therefore fell silently, unlike the V-1, which had a loud engine.

But the V-2 failed strategically. It might have targeted ports the Allies were using, but Hitler thought of it mainly as a weapon of terror in London. Observers thought this irrational but it wasn’t. Missiles are expensive, and the Germans had relatively few.

The V-2 did not have the precision to hit critical port targets and too small a blast radius to engulf any target. Attacking a city meant that it was likely to hit something, and in hitting something, it might compel the British public to force the government to agree to a cease-fire.

That never happened, but instead, it linked the guided missile to terror. It was seen as a weapon so devastating that it could force an enemy to capitulate.

The V-2 was developed by a team headed by Wernher von Braun, a German scientist who was captured, along with much of his team, by the Americans as part of Operation Paperclip, a program that seized samples, plans and above all the scientists who designed the V-2.

Von Braun later became an American citizen and hero. (He wrote a biography titled “I Aim for the Stars.” Humorist Tom Lehrer suggested that the title be changed to “I Aim for the Stars; Sometimes I hit London.”)

The Soviets had a program similar to Operation Paperclip, but it had a number of problems.

The German rocket facilities were located on the North Sea, and scientists elsewhere, aware that Operation Paperclip was underway, preferred to be captured by the Americans, not the Soviets. Still, both the Russian and American missile and space programs were designed in the 1950s and founded on the V-2 rocket by a number of German scientists. The first American space satellite was launched by a Jupiter-C missile, which was an updated and renamed Redstone rocket, which was an updated and renamed V-2 rocket.

Both the Americans and the Soviets grasped the importance of missiles early. At first, the thought was to employ them as the Germans had: as a weapon whose goal was to destroy civilian populations. This thinking shifted with the introduction of the first atomic bomb.

The Cold War quickly settled in on Europe, and the United States had a huge advantage: an advanced long-range bomber force based around the Soviet Union’s periphery. The Soviets’ own long-range bomber force did not encircle the United States, nor could it reach the United States. They, therefore, were in a desperate position. The United States had a nuclear option.

The Soviets did not.

The Soviets could not build an intercontinental bomber force because the technology and the training needed to build a capable strategic air force was stunningly expensive and would take a long time to develop. In the meantime, throughout the 1950s, the United States built up its bomber force, with the B-52 as the superb solution. A conventional war commenced by the Soviets was therefore impossible, as the U.S. had unchallenged nuclear superiority – though, notably, it didn’t use it.

The Soviet solution was to develop a missile force that could counter the American threat. The foundation of their counter was the German V-2 and their German scientists, as well as a strong Soviet engineering team. The problem with V-2 was range. The Soviets needed a weapon with intercontinental range and a better guidance system, and that takes a decade to develop. But they moved forward rapidly.

The U.S., meanwhile, noted the work being done on Soviet missiles and was content to lag behind because of its vast bomber superiority. But the U.S. realized in time that the development of the Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile could pose a threat to its bomber force.

An ICBM launched from the Soviet Union could hit the U.S. in about 30 minutes. Scrambling a B-52 squadron from standby status to airborne and clear of the target would likely take longer. So the U.S. moved to continual alert status, with some B-52s aloft at all times in the north, the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) operating out of Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado Springs and a line of radar stations positioned throughout northern Canada.

In many ways, this was premature. The Soviets had developed shorter-range missiles, which they used to launch Sputnik and astronauts like Yuri Gagarin into space, but not yet a significant, solid fuel ICBM. It was important that the ICBM use solid fuel because loading a missile with liquid nitrogen takes hours.

Leaving liquid oxygen in a missile is both dangerous and pointless as it bleeds out. Responding to an American attack in Europe, for example, with a liquid fuel ICBM would be difficult. The Soviet dilemma was that, as late as 1960, they could not hit the United States with nuclear weapons, while the U.S. could hit them. The Soviets had based massive fighters in the north, along with surface-to-air missiles to take out attacking B-52s, but they knew there would be massive leakage through the line.

This strategic quandary forced them to develop solid fuel systems that could remain in the missile – something that had been in development since the early 1960s. But the strategic problem was that the Soviets posed no threat to the continental U.S. (aside from some submarines that could hit the United States). This was a driving force behind the Cuban Missile Crisis and Soviet support for Fidel Castro.

Lacking ICBMs and having limited and insufficiently reliable submarine-launched missiles, the Soviets needed bases close to the United States. By having missiles in Cuba, they had the U.S. within range. But the U.S. responded by threatening war; the Soviets knew they could not win a nuclear war and so capitulated.

At this point, the Soviets accelerated their ICBM program, and the Americans accelerated theirs. The speed of the Soviet ICBMs threatened the U.S. bomber force, which was no longer enough of a deterrent. The U.S. was already working on this in the late 1950s, launching satellites and starting the Mercury program, essentially a spin-off of the broader missile program. Both sides surged their nuclear submarine program as well. By the early 1970s, both countries had ICBMs and submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and mutual assured destruction became a meaningful concept.

With the advent of missile development, the key was to know the other side’s capabilities. The Americans used the U-2 spy plane for this purpose. The Soviets used more conventional intelligence capabilities, like hanging around in bars near air force bases. But the U-2 was shot down, and traditional intelligence didn’t work. The satellite programs both countries were working on in the 1960s had less to do with manned flight than with reconnaissance satellites that could see missile facilities from low Earth orbit.

The first U.S. satellite reconnaissance system involved dropping buckets of film from a satellite and having an airplane fly by and catch them. This was not really workable. Another series used TV cameras to beam down really low-quality pictures. By the early sixties, both sides were using high-definition cameras to transmit pictures back to Earth. Their offspring now can be found in your smart phone.

The ICBM required a constant presence in space, circling 60-90 miles above Earth. In geosynchronous orbit (the altitude and speed at which a satellite matches the Earth’s rotation) lurked satellites that had infrared ability and could sense a missile launch. Along with them, there were communication satellites and so on.

The threat of nuclear war required constant surveillance. The only place where that surveillance was possible was in space.

Today, anyone who wants to wage war must destroy those sensors, which are infinitely more sophisticated than they were in the 1960s. Space is very crowded, and the fear of being blinded by the enemy haunts all major countries.

From the moment the first V-2 hit London, the fear of war has driven space exploration.