Defense: Don’t Look Up–There’s a Missile There

“It will be safer than having an airplane overhead,” said an Army officer. New Mexico’s Democratic Governor Jack Campbell went even farther. Living in an area with supersonic missiles whizzing overhead, he claimed, would be less risky than driving on most highways. The assurances were part of a year-long “education” program mounted by U.S. missilemen in Utah and New Mexico to pave the way for the first prolonged series of missile shots over populated areas.

Astronomic Odds. Last week the program got under way as five slender, needlelike Army Pershing missiles lifted from a barren mesa outside the town of Blanding, Utah, climbed above the earth’s atmosphere and arced to bull’s-eye landings in impact areas at the heavily instrumented White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, some 350 miles to the southeast. Later this month, the Air Force will launch the first of some 80 Athena rockets from Green River, Utah, to White Sands, a span of almost 500 miles. The Athenas, toting experimental nose cones are expected to provide valuable data on re-entry problems.

For the Pershing shots, 16 families who live in a 15-mile zone in front of the launching site were evacuated to hotels and fed at Government expense. For each of the Green River tests, nearly 1,000 people will have to be moved. Residents of the corridors over which the missiles fly are unaffected, since scientists insist that the odds against a mishap are astronomical once the big birds have achieved their ballistic trajectories. But merely evacuating residents from the launch areas and the spots where boosters are likely to fall can be a costly business; for the year alone, the House has approved payments of up to $1,720,000 to cover such moves.

Compelling Reasons. Why is the U.S. going to all the expense and bother involved instead of just shooting the missiles into the ocean? For one thing, land shots make for much more precise measurements of impact areas than do missile shoots into the ocean. For an other, sending a few Jeeps into the desert to pick up the pieces of an impacted missile is a whale of a lot cheaper than sending a flotilla of Navy cruisers all over the Atlantic or Pacific to look for a rocket launched from Vandenberg or Canaveral. And finally, White Sands has more monitoring equipment planted within its 4,000-square-mile confines than could be carried by any Navy force short of an armada.

So compelling are the reasons, in fact, that some missilemen are talking up far more ambitious projects for the future. Among them: firing intercontinental missiles from the Pacific Northwest, from Alaska, and even from Polaris subs in the middle of the Pacific, to the spacious White Sands range.