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A Brief History of Field Artillery Rockets, Missiles, and The A BRIEF HISTORY OF FIELD ARTILLERY ROCKETS, MISSILES, AND THE THREAT Dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 heralded the beginning of the atomic age, often called the nuclear age. Initially, the American defense establishment made strategic atomic weapons and airpower its number one priority to deter aggression and relegated the ground forces to a distant second. The Soviet acquisition of the atomic bomb in 1949, the fall of China to the communists in 1949, and the Korean War of the early 1950s, however, energized the Army to develop tactical atomic field artillery rockets and guided missiles to augment a conventional atomic cannon and to complement strategic atomic weapons. After the Korean War and through the 1980s, the Soviet-Warsaw Pact threat motivated the Army and the Field Artillery to continue modernizing and expanding their tactical nuclear weapons arsenal. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact in the 1990s, the need for tactical nuclear weapons disappeared. This emboldened the President of the United States, George H.W. Bush, to eliminate country’s tactical nuclear weapons and forced Army and the Field Artillery to rely upon long-range conventional rockets and missiles to counter international threats to national security. FIRST GENERATION OF NUCLEAR ROCKETS AND MISSILES Following World War Two, the American military community concluded that an air-delivered atomic bomb (a fission bomb in which the atom nucleus was split to generate energy) represented the ultimate weapon. President Harry Truman and the American defense community relied upon the threat of the atomic bomb as the nation’s first line of defense to deter and even halt an invasion of West Europe by the numerically superior Soviet army. As the War Department Equipment Board of 1946, headed by General Joseph W. Stilwell, pointed out, this required developing atomic bombs and long-range bombers as the nation’s number one priority and warning potential threats that an unprovoked attack on American interests would cause the United States to counter with atomic weapons. The Army Air Force would drop atomic bombs on enemy industrial areas, military bases, and naval ports, to name a few targets, in response to an attack. To make this a reality, the Air Force, created by the National Defense Act of 1947, acquired the B-36 “Peacemaker” bomber, a piston-engine aircraft with a range of 9,000 miles and a speed of 435 miles per hour in 1949, and the B-47 bomber, a jet engine aircraft with a range of 4,600 miles without bombs and speed of 587 miles per hour in 1951. Both had the ability to deliver the atomic bomb.1 While dropping atomic bombs dominated the defense community’s thinking and determined priorities, military strategists still recognized the supporting role of the ground forces in this new age. They would occupy the hostile territory after the bomb had been dropped and mop up any enemy military forces that might have survived the blast. In view of this, the Stilwell Board predicted a prominent role for ground based long-range field artillery rockets and guided missiles to strike deep into enemy territory and antiaircraft artillery to protect the ground forces from enemy aircraft. Sometime in the future, these rockets and missiles would augment the light caliber, multiple rocket launchers with ranges of 5,000 yards that had been employed during World War Two to saturate a target with rockets and to complement cannon (tube) artillery. The Stilwell Board even envisioned using rockets and guided missiles to deliver an atomic warhead.2 2 Upon reviewing Army equipment requirements in light of the progress in rocket and guided missile technology since 1946, the Army Equipment Board of March 1950 under Lieutenant General John R. Hodge supported obtaining atomic bombs as the top priority as advocated by the Stilwell Board, promoted modernizing the ground force’s equipment, and urged the Army to develop surface-to-surface and surface-to-air rockets and guided missiles. The latter would defend the country and overseas military installations against air threats, while the former would carry conventional or atomic warheads to support fast-moving, highly mobile combat units. However, with World War Two over and no major conflict in sight at the beginning of 1950, the defense budget of fiscal year 1950 restricted military spending; and the Department of Defense prioritized its efforts on acquiring aircraft to deliver the atomic bomb.3 Unanticipated events prompted the Army to step up the pace of acquiring rockets and missiles. Late in 1949, the Soviets detonated their own atomic bomb to end the American monopoly of the bomb. According to the Central Intelligence Agency in 1950 the American monopoly had discouraged the Soviets from invading West Europe. Armed with their own atomic bomb, they now would be emboldened to attack. This meant that the nation’s ground forces had to be modernized. In 1949 China fell to the communists under Mao Tse Tung. Subsequently, North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950, reaffirming to American leaders the Soviet Union’s hostility and willingness to support a client state’s assault on American interests. The invasion also heightened American fears about Communist aggression and a potential attack on West Europe. Later in 1951, the Central Intelligence Agency predicted that the Soviets would have 200 atomic bombs by 1954 and would employ them to strike cities and military targets in West Europe. These 3 series of events provided the existential national security crisis for the United States. This prompted President Dwight D. Eisenhower to decide that the United States needed to be equipped with the most modern weapons to deter Soviet aggression and to sign National Security Council Memorandum 162/2 in October 1953. This memorandum encouraged maintaining and even expanding the country’s nuclear arsenal and played importantly in the formulation of a doctrine of massive retaliation under the rubric of “the New Look,” declaring that the United States would respond to communist aggression by employing nuclear weapons. In harmony with this, the country developed a nuclear bomb (a fusion bomb in which a fission bomb was used to compress and heat fusion fuel to generate much greater energy) to be dropped by an aircraft and a nuclear warhead to be delivered by an intercontinental missile to stay ahead of the Soviets and to discourage Soviet and Chinese aggression. Eisenhower’s “New Look” strategy of relying on nuclear weapons and the subsequent spurt of military technological innovation aimed to compensate for the Soviet conventional forces’ numerical superiority and has often been called “the first offset” by some historians and political scientists. Basically, the United States planned to rely on nuclear weapons to counteract the Soviet numerical superiority in conventional military forces. At the time the Soviets could assemble around 175 active divisions and had 125 reserve divisions. In comparison, the United States had 29 Army and Marine divisions with seven in the reserve and could not afford to expand its conventional forces.4 Simultaneously, Soviet acquisition of an atomic bomb forced the Army to accelerate development of tactical atomic weapons. Fearing that West Europe would now be vulnerable to a Soviet attack with conventional and atomic weapons, the Army initiated work in May 1950 to acquire an atomic cannon. Rushed into production, the M-65 280- 4 mm. cannon, called Atomic Annie, fired an atomic warhead for the first time on 25 May 1953 at Frenchman Flats, Nevada. The warhead had a yield of 15-kilotons, which was equal to the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945. Weighing 88 tons, the ungainly cannon required two tractor trucks to move it – one on its front and one on its rear. The cannon lacked the range (maximum range was 30 kilometers or 20 miles) and flexibility of aircraft-delivered munitions; but it could provide atomic fire support to ground forces in all weather and at night whereas aircraft had difficulties providing support in inclement weather and during hours of darkness.5 Concurrently, the Army rushed the Honest John rocket through development by using as much off-the-shelf equipment and parts as possible because it promised to provide the requisite conventional and atomic firepower for the Army. The Army hoped to deploy the rocket to Korea as an interim rocket until it could be replaced by a better one. Fielded in 1954 after the Korean War armistice had been signed in 1953, the M31 Honest John was a free-flight, fin-stabilized, solid propellant rocket. It was fired from a rail-type launcher, received no guidance in flight, and followed a ballistic trajectory similar to a cannon projectile. It carried a 1,500-pound conventional or atomic warhead, had a range of 5.7 to 15.7 miles (9.2 to 25.26 kilometers), could hit within 300 yards (274 meters) of the target, could be transported on highways or cross country with ease, and was less expensive than a guided missile. Even armed with a conventional warhead, it furnished more fire power than heavy cannon field artillery. The rocket also provided responsive fire support for the division and could engage targets beyond the enemy’s forward line of troops and out of range of conventional cannon artillery.6 5 Atomic Annie, an 8-inch nuclear projectile introduced in 1955, and Honest John gave the Army the capability to discourage and even thwart a massive Soviet armor strike through the Fulda Gap into West Germany that would easily overwhelm the West’s numerically inferior forces. By the mid-1950s, these nuclear weapons along with strategic nuclear weapons served as the primary means of defending West Europe and prompted the Army to develop its pentomic division of five battle groups by 1957 to function on the atomic battlefield.
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