Radar Man

Prologue When the fighting of World War II was nearing its end the armies of the Allies (The United States, Great Britain, France and several other countries) and the Soviet Union were rushing to conquer and partition Germany. After the last battles the Soviets occupied and claimed a large part of Eastern Germany and the capitol city, Berlin. Subsequently, the Soviets erected a wall to keep people from escaping their tyrannical rule. The wall divided the city into East Berlin and West Berlin. It was destined to cause extreme tensions between former partners in the defeat of Germany and her allies. Britain’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared the wall an “Iron Curtain”. Josef Stalin, the dictator of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), had an ambition to conquer and rule all of Europe but was thwarted by the United States of America and her allies. In effect, the Soviets were confined behind the wall. Stalin then began to build up his military power. Among the results were surprises that shocked the Western countries, an “atom bomb” explosion, “Sputnik”, the first satellite to orbit the Earth, “fractional orbit” bombs, and inter-continental missiles along with improved fighter and bomber aircraft. “Mutual Assured Destruction” (MAD) seemed to be the order of the day. The Western countries were in serious danger and had almost no reliable means to know what the Soviets were doing, where they were doing it, what their results were, how many of each article of armament they had and where they were deployed. The state of military intelligence was so meager and out-dated that the situation seemed desperate. That was the era of the beginning of the “Cold War”, a time of much blustering and bluffing that went on, presumably to cause each side to disclose “secrets”. A very serious activity by the Western countries, principally The United States and Great Britain, was surveillance flights utilizing World War II aircraft along the perimeters of the Soviet Union and limited forays into its captured territories. Many of the aircraft were shot down and hundreds of their crewmen were captured or killed. The results were very limited in value because, at the altitudes they could fly, their cameras could not produce usable pictures of objects more than a few miles inside the enemy territory and they were very vulnerable to being shot down. President Eisenhower bravely, but cautiously, allowed occasional surveillance flights. He was concerned about the possibility of military conflict or adverse political reactions. I was only vaguely aware of the gravity of the situation after my discharge from the U.S. Navy and during my subsequent civilian life. After working for eight years at Lockheed designing and testing aircraft antennas, Luther Duncan MacDonald, for whom I had worked before I joined the Navy, recommended me to Clarence Leonard “Kelly” Johnson. After a short interview I was invited to join his Advanced Development Projects (the famous “Skunk Works”) wherein I was introduced to the highly secretive “black world” of designing and developing aircraft capable of monitoring a potential enemy’s military developments and deployments. Before I became a Skunk Worker I had no knowledge about the surveillance flights and their disastrous consequences. I did not know that Lockheed had produced an aircraft, the U-2, that could fly more than a thousand miles across the Soviet Union at altitudes higher than their aircraft or ground- launched missiles could reach. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had sponsored the development and production of several U-2 aircraft and had conducted the surveillance efforts. At first the CIA’s technical advisors thought that the U-2 would not be detected by the Soviet early warning radars. When the first operational flight was detected almost at takeoff and was tracked by the missile control radars during the flight, disillusionment and alarm set in. The CIA experts’ hastily contrived additions to a U-2 intended to reduce the early warning radar reflections were not successful. That was why Kelly Johnson invited me in August of 1957 to join his Advanced Development Projects. We, Lockheed, worked with the CIA for a short time to try to reduce the U-2’s vulnerability to the Soviet radars and missiles because no other aircraft could fly as high and as far as the U-2 aircrafts had been doing. CIA project manager Dr. Richard M. Bissell, Jr., and Kelly Johnson were convinced that a new, much more capable aircraft urgently was needed. The CIA had thought that the U-2 would be useful for about two years and would be replaced after that time. It was operated intermittently in surveillance service for four years until 1960 when Gary Powers was shot down. In fact, it was employed later for several critical missions until it was superseded by extremely advanced aircrafts, the A-12 OXCART and the SR-71 BLACKBIRD, also products of Lockheed’s Skunk Works. I led the development of test facilities and methods for the first efforts to measure the “Radar Cross Section” (RCS) of scaled models, and materials development and testing. I did the preliminary design of a major test facility, an “anechoic chamber” (no radar echos chamber) that was used for evaluating the radar echos of scaled model aircraft designs. The walls, ceiling, and floor were covered by material that absorbed electromagnetic waves and also absorbed sound to such an extent that a person standing inside could hear blood pulsing inside his or her head. Also I led the design and development of electronic equipment used to measure the echos from models and large samples of radar wave absorber materials. During 1958 we investigated in that chamber many proposed designs that resulted in the A-12 aircraft proposal to the CIA. In early 1959 we were awarded a contract to begin the design of the A-12 supersonic aircraft that could fly over any Soviet territory cruising at 2,000 miles per hour at 80,000 feet (or higher) and be very difficult for their radars to detect and track. In a meeting in 1959 in Burbank with Dr. Bissell and several of his people we discussed our progress and some anticipated difficulties in the preliminary design. Dr. Bissell seemed satisfied with most of the discussions but said that he was very concerned about the radar reflections caused by the very large exhaust outlets. In fact he was considering terminating the design efforts.