Thor's Flight

Dazzling in the Florida sunshine, a slender white missile, 60-odd feet long, rested on its launching pad at the Cape Canaveral Missile Test Center one morning last week. At count down's end, fire flashed at its base, and the monster slowly rose into the air, a pencil of orange flame lengthening behind it. Straight up it rocketed, gathering speed. Several miles up in the bright blue sky, it arched gracefully into a southeastward course, dwindled to a speck and then, 2 1/4 minutes after rising from its pad, disappeared out over the Atlantic, hurtling on toward a faraway watery target.

Fulfilled was the Air Force's prayerful hope: Thor, at long last, had been successfully fired. A special top-level Defense Department committee, set up to settle the rivalry between Thor and its Army counterpart, Jupiter, was pondering whether to scrap one of the two intermediate-range (1,500-mile) ground-to-ground ballistic missiles or combine them in a hybrid with the best features of both. The Army made much of the fact that the less complex Jupiter had performed well in tests, while Thor, in its three tests, had twice flopped dismally, skipped off course the third time. Finally, after two strikes and a foul tip, Thor had saved Air Force face by hitting a mighty home run. More importantly, its undisputed success had added a mighty score to the West's defenses, particularly from NATO nations and overseas bases: Thor in last week's test traveled not just 1,500 miles, but 2,000.

Jupiter has traveled even farther. Researchman William A. Holaday, missiles assistant to Defense Secretary Wilson, remarked in a speech last week that the U.S. had fired a ballistic missile "thousands of miles," and he was apparently talking about Jupiter, which reportedly traveled 3,600 miles on its longest flight from Cape Canaveral.

Between them, Thor's successful test shoot and Holaday's announcement took much of the menace out of Moscow's boast that Russia had tested a long-range ballistic missile, proving that "it is possible to direct missiles into any part of the world" (TIME, Sept. 9). But the Russian claim seemed to carry little imminent menace anyway after Secretary Wilson, at his last-week press conference, pointed out in passing just what it was the Russians said: not that they had a supply of inter-continental ballistic missiles, but that they had proved the possibility of an ICBM. Could the U.S., a newsman asked, have made the same claim a year ago?

Wilson: Certainly, we could have if we wanted to.

Newsman: Well, why don't we want to?

Wilson: What good does it do?

The U.S., Engine Charlie seemed to be saying, would go on working toward an operational ICBM (a test of the Air Force's intercontinental Atlas is scheduled for this week at Cape Canaveral), and leave the intercontinental chest-thumping to the Russians.

While developing an arsenal of ballistic missiles for retaliatory or offensive power, the U.S. is also working on defense against Russian ICBMs. Until recently, scientists and military men generally agreed that a nuclear-armed ICBM, hurtling toward its target at 15,000 m.p.h., would be an "ultimate weapon," against which a nation could do nothing to save its cities from destruction. Last week General Thomas D. White, Air Force Chief of Staff, announced that the Air Force has developed a new radar system that could detect an oncoming ICBM as much as 3,000 miles away. Based on the ORDIR (omnirange digital radar) devised by Columbia University scientists (TIME, Aug. 19), the new warning system would allow perhaps 15 minutes for defenders to compute the oncoming missile's course and speed with electronic brains, and launch a missile to intercept it high up in the sky.

The U.S. now has no missile capable of intercepting an ICBM, but both the Army and the Air Force are working on "aunties" (Pentagon slang for antimissile missiles). An auntie would have to perform with fantastically superfine precision--unattainable, some scientists fear--in order to find a remote target moving at 15,000 m.p.h., but if it does prove to be feasible, auntie plus ORDIR would take the ultimateness out of the ultimate weapon.

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