Nation: The Scrap over Skybolt

The Anglo-American crisis, said one angry Londoner, was the most serious since Suez. U.S. and British officials argued bitterly, and the British press roared the Lion’s wrath. Britain, it was clear, felt that it had been doublecrossed by its closest ally—and all over a missile named Skybolt that has never yet worked.

Skybolt is a 40-ft.. two-stage, solid-fuel weapon designed to ride under a bomber’s wing, then streak off on its own with a nuclear warhead aimed at targets up to 1,000 miles away. So far, the U.S. has spent or committed $657 million to develop Skybolt for use with the Strategic Air Command’s B-52 bomber. And Britain has spent $25 million to adapt its otherwise obsolescent Vulcan II bomber to Skybolt.

There comes the rub. Britain has no long-range missile force of its own, canceled one land-based missile project—the 2,000-mile Blue Streak—in favor of a U.S. offer to develop Skybolt and charge Britain only the production costs of the missiles it orders. Since Britain was thereby persuaded to place all its missile hopes in Skybolt, it came as a considerable shock when the U.S. last week threatened to scrub the entire project.

Five Failures. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara has not included any new funds for Skybolt in his next defense budget. Last week in London, he explained why to British Defense Minister Peter Thorneycroft. In five flight tests so far, Skybolt’s first stage has three times either failed to ignite or properly to lift the bird; twice, the second stage failed to fire. McNamara stressed Skybolt’s “enormous complexity,” noted that Skybolt development is lagging a year behind schedule, argued that the U.S.’s silo-protected, fast-firing Minuteman ICBM has vastly diminished the need for Skybolt.

Such talk did not calm the British. For one thing, they suspected that the U.S. would be just as happy if Britain continued without its own nuclear deterrent. For another, they thought the U.S. might be using the threat of killing Skybolt to pressure Britain into making a bigger contribution to NATO’s conventional forces—a long-avowed U.S. aim. Finally, the British do not agree with McNamara’s estimate of Skybolt and its potential. That disagreement is shared by many in the U.S.

High-Flying Pad. Skybolt’s defenders insist that the five test failures are virtually meaningless; almost all missiles have failed in their early tests, including Polaris. The Skybolt enthusiasts say that their bird, along with Polaris and Minuteman, would give the U.S. greater missile flexibility—an aim long pursued by the Kennedy Administration. Minuteman’s fixed bases can presumably be pinpointed and destroyed by an enemy, and Polaris’ submarines move into position at only 30 knots, but Skybolt’s bombers can fly at more than 600 m.p.h.

But Robert McNamara remains unimpressed; to him, Skybolt seems worth neither the cost nor the effort. Groans an Air Force strategist: ”They threw our Skybolt into a cost-effectiveness computer. and it came up ’tilt.’ ” If Skybolt’s advocates insist on comparing their bird with Minuteman and Polaris, claim its critics, they are on shaky ground. Skybolt is more elusive than a land missile only when it is airborne. But the cost of keeping a B-52 fleet aloft is immense —and a SAC base is a much softer target than a hardened silo. A nuclear submarine may move slowly, but it can be deployed within striking range of its targets for months without refueling and at low cost.

So far, President Kennedy has backed McNamara. At his news conference, Kennedy placed the cost of the Skybolt system at $2.5 billion, a figure that Skybolt contractors feel is much too high. Kennedy also seemed to express doubt that Skybolt will ever work at all. Said he in a strangely defeatist statement: ”It has been really, in a sense, the kind of engineering that’s been beyond us.”

In seeking to soothe the British, the U.S. made it clear that Britain is free to go ahead with Skybolt—at its own expense. But this would require an increase of about 30% in Britain’s income tax—a prospect hardly palatable to any government, much less Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s hard-pressed Tories. The U.S. will also offer to help Britain adapt its nuclear submarines to carry Polaris missiles; this would be better, but still not enough to satisfy the British. And Macmillan will certainly express that dissatisfaction in his Nassau meeting with Kennedy this week.