Monday, May. 06, 1974

On Soviet Missile Development

In the 1950s we had become increasingly concerned about our navy, which consisted mostly of surface ships armed with outmoded artillery. Our military arranged for members of the leadership to inspect the Black Sea Fleet. I attended staff maneuvers on board a cruiser. One of our commanders gave a report on how "our" fleet had met and routed "the enemy" in the map exercises. He started rattling off how "our" fleet was sinking "enemy" ships right and left. He was terribly cocky. It made me sad to listen to him. Finally, I couldn't restrain myself any longer. I interrupted him and said: "Stop! Wait! You keep talking with such certainty about how you've made short work of the enemy, and now you're telling me there's nothing left to do but polish off the enemy. Have you really assessed the situation correctly? If this were a real war and not just a map exercise, your ships would all be lying on the bottom of the sea by now."

He looked at me with complete surprise.

I went on: "You haven't taken into account the missiles which the enemy would certainly be using against you from his shore defenses and from missile-launching planes. We have such a system ourselves, so surely the other side has it too. It's terribly dangerous to underestimate your enemy's capabilities."

The commander was obviously perplexed. "Comrade Khrushchev," he said, "I've never heard of missile-launching planes before. You're telling me something entirely new."

"Then it's our own fault," I told him. "All this information must be classified." I turned to the other members of the Presidium and suggested, "Comrades, let's interrupt our conference and take our naval officers ashore so that they can familiarize themselves with our missile system. It's important that our commanders know both what we have and what the enemy has. Otherwise, in the event of war, they'll make crude miscalculations and get into big trouble." Either then and there, or later when we returned to Moscow, we decided to stop keeping everything secret from our military commanders.

Khrushchev goes on to describe how the Russians developed their first rocket after Stalin's death in 1953. The project was supervised by Sergei Pavlovich Korolyov--"probably our most prominent and brilliant missile designer." Once, Khrushchev recalls, Korolyov reported to the leadership on his work.

I don't want to exaggerate, but I'd say we gawked at what he showed us as if we were a bunch of sheep seeing through a gate for the first time. When he showed us one of his rockets, we thought it looked like nothing but a huge cigar-shaped tube, and we didn't believe it could fly. Korolyov took us on a tour of a launching pad and tried to explain how the rocket worked. We were like peasants in a marketplace. We walked around and around the rocket, touching it, tapping it to see if it was sturdy enough. We did everything but lick it. Some people might say that we were technological ignoramuses.

Several models of Korolyov's first test rocket, called Semyorka (Number 7) exploded. Khrushchev reveals that in one such incident in October 1960, Mikhail Yangel, a colleague of Korolyov's, survived only because he stepped into a special insulated smoking room to have a cigarette. Dozens of other witnesses, including Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin, then commander in chief of Soviet missile forces, were burned to death. Despite these early failures, Khrushchev notes that "thanks to Comrade Korolyov and his associates, we now had a rocket that could carry a nuclear warhead." The Semyorka, Khrushchev adds, paved the Soviet road into outer space.

Some of my conversations with Comrade Korolyov made me worry that if war ever came, our enemy might be able to destroy our Semyorka before we could get it into the air. The rocket was fired from a launching pad which looked like a huge tabletop and could easily be detected by reconnaissance planes or satellites in orbit around the earth.

So what could we do to avoid detection? My experience early in life as a coal miner and later as a supervisor during the building of the Moscow Metro came in handy when I began trying to think of ways we could hide our missile sites from enemy reconnaissance. It occurred to me that since missiles are cylindrical, we could put them into sunken covered shafts.

I told some engineers about my idea and asked them their views on the feasibility. They hemmed and hawed and finally told me they thought the idea wouldn't work. I was flabbergasted, but--always mindful of my political status--I realized I had no right to force the idea down their throats. I assumed these people knew their own professions, so I let the matter drop.

A year or more passed. My son Sergei, who's an engineer himself, had something to do with missiles and kept me informed on how the testing program was going. He also followed American publications closely. One day, to my surprise and delight, he told me that he'd read in some American journal that the U.S. had begun to replace launching pads with silos.

Look at this, Father," he said. "The Americans have introduced the plan which you thought up a year or so ago but which our people turned down." Now I felt justified in giving some orders. I summoned the people responsible and said, "Now look what's happened! The Americans have begun to dig the ballistic missile shafts which I proposed a long time ago. Let's get started on this program right away."

I don't think it was until after my retirement that we completely converted our missile system from launching pads to sunken silos, but I was proud of my role in originating the idea and later seeing that the conversion was begun.

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