Word: schrievers
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During World War II Officer Schriever rose from captain to colonel, flew 63 missions chiefly as a B-17 pilot in the Pacific, rose through varied air-logistics jobs to command the advanced echelon of Far East Air Service Command. He saw less than an ambitious airman would want to of the shooting match, but he continued to qualify himself for research and development. He learned something of the shoestring tragedies of R and D when a B-17 fitted with a new flare-dropping rack that he had designed caught fire mysteriously over Cairns, Australia and crashed, killing...
...postwar armed forces began to explore new ways of war, the Air Force installed Schriever in the Pentagon to help plan a vague new development program. Month after month thereafter, he moved unobtrusively about the fringes of the chaos of the U.S.'s first moves into missilery. As early as 1950 he was one of the very few-and very unpopular-airmen who did not like the Air Force's cherished B-52. Schriever argued obstinately for a lighter, faster bomber that could fire air-to-ground missiles...
...Schriever lost that battle, and some others. Of an early ICBM project, he said: "It had a questionable military value based on the then state of the art, so we sort of put it on the back burner." But interest in missiles was picking up, and one of the reasons was Schriever's visionary enthusiasm. Everywhere he debated and discoursed upon the values and virtues of missiles, missiles, missiles with such fervor that, according to one friendly scientist, "they thought Ben was insane...
...Colonel Schriever, in charge of development planning for Air Force headquarters, was one of the R and D officers who felt-and he proclaimed what he felt insistently-that a full survey of future nuclear warhead design ought to be made so as to shrink the cumbersome new hydrogen bomb into an ICBM. The H-bomb had a higher range of destruction than the Abomb, the argument went, and the need for pinpoint accuracy was therefore reduced...
Black Friday. The U.S.'s payoff bet is Ben Schriever's ICBM, and Schriever knows how to play for high stakes. One Friday a month, a day his staff calls Black Friday, he summons his key men into his project control room in WDD headquarters in Inglewood. This room is a massive vault whose walls, floors and ceilings are built of 6-in. concrete reinforced by steel; its treasures are guarded when the room is empty by two opaque glass hemispheres embedded in the ceiling, so sensitive that they will register an intruder's breath and sound...