page_title: Bernard Schriever
section_title: Missiles
hierarchical_section_title: Bernard Schriever / Post-war / Missiles
caption_attribution_description: English: Then-Brig. Gen. Bernard Schriever address a session of the Von Neumann Committee at the Western Development Division's Arbor Vitae Complex in Inglewood, Calif. in the fall of 1955. The Committee had been reconstituted as the Atlas Scientific Advisory Committee. Facing Gen. Schriever in the front row (left to right) are George McRae of Sandia Corporation, aviation legend Charles Lindbergh, Gen. Thomas Power, commander of the Air Research and Development Command, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force Trevor Gardner, Committee Chairman John von Neumann, Col. Harold Norton, H. Guyford Stever of MIT and Clark Millikan of Caltech (U.S. Air Force photo)
context_page_description: Bernard Adolph Schriever, also known as Bennie Schriever, was a United States Air Force general who played a major role in the Air Force's space and ballistic missile programs.
  Born in Bremen, Germany, Schriever immigrated to the United States as a boy and became a naturalized US citizen in 1923. He graduated from Texas A&M in 1931, and was commissioned as a reserve second lieutenant in the U.S. Army. He transferred to the United States Army Air Corps and was awarded his wings and a commission as a reservist second lieutenant in 1933. In 1937, he was released from active duty at his own request and became a pilot with Northwest Airlines, but he returned to the Air Corps with a regular commission in 1938.
  During World War II, Schriever received a Master of Arts in aeronautical engineering from Stanford University in June 1942, and was sent to the Southwest Pacific Area, where he flew combat missions as a bomber pilot with the 19th Bombardment Group until it returned to the United States in 1943. He remained in Australia as chief of the maintenance and engineering division of the Fifth Air Force Service Command until the end of the war.
context_section_description: In March 1953, Schriever attended a meeting of the Scientific Advisory Board at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. The United States had only recently conducted Ivy Mike, its first hydrogen bomb test, on 1 November 1952. The Ivy Mike device had weighed 82 short tons (74 t), but at the meeting two of the board members, John von Neumann and Edward Teller, predicted that by 1960 a hydrogen bomb could be built that weighed just 1 short ton (0.91 t) but with the explosive power of 10 megatons of TNT (42 PJ). The strategic implications of this were obvious to Schriever: an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) could be built to deliver hydrogen bombs. The low weight meant that the missile would not have to be impractically large, and the reasonably high yield meant that it did not need to be impractically accurate.
  The USAF had an ICBM project initially known as Project MX-1593 running since January 1951. It became Project Atlas in August 1951. Atlas was expected to weigh 440,000 pounds (200,000 kg), and deliver a 3,000-pound (1,400 kg) nuclear warhead within 1,500 feet (460 m) of the target. If the warhead weight could be cut to 1,500 pounds (680 kg), the weight of the launch vehicle could be halved. On his own initiative, Schriever went to see von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study on 8 May 1953. Von Neumann explained the process by which smaller and lighter hydrogen bombs of lesser yield would be developed in the future, and Schriever left the meeting convinced.
  Schriever found an ally in the incoming Eisenhower administration in Trevor Gardner, the Secretary of the Air Force's special assistant for research and development. In October 1953 Gardner created the Teapot Committee to review the USAF's strategic missile projects. In its report, which it rendered on 10 February 1954, it recommended a crash program that would produce a deployable ICBM in six to eight years. On 14 May 1954, White gave Project Atlas the highest Air Force development priority, and directed the new ARDC commander, Lieutenant General Thomas S. Power, to accelerate the Project Atlas "to the maximum extent that technology would allow".
  To steer the project, Gardner created a special Scientific Advisory Committee chaired by von Neumann in April 1954. Its nine members included seven who had served on the Teapot Committee. On 1 July 1954, Power created a special agency, the Western Development Division (WDD), to manage the ICBM development effort. It was initially located in the recently vacated buildings of the St. John Chrysostom School in Inglewood, California, in order to be close to Convair, the prime contractor for Project Atlas. Officers posted there were instructed to wear civilian clothes to disguise the nature of the organization. White initially intended for the WDD to be headed by his special assistant for research and development, Major General James McCormack, but McCormack suffered from health problems, so Schriever succeeded him as White's special assistant and assumed command of the WDD on 2 August 1954.
  The normal model for management of Air Forces projects was for them to be managed by the airframe manufacturer, with USAF oversight. This was favored by high-ranking Air Force officers and was the model that Schriever initially proposed. It had worked well on aircraft development projects as recently as the B-47 and B-52, but not so well on recent missile projects like Navaho and Snark, which had suffered from long delays and high-cost overruns. The Scientific Advisory Committee did not agree; it felt that the Atlas project was of such a highly scientific and technical nature that a project more like the Manhattan Project was required and that the aircraft industry, with its inflexible work practices, could not attract the required expertise. After consulting with Leslie Groves and Robert Oppenheimer, Schriever came back to the Scientific Advisory Committee with a radical proposal: WDD would manage the project directly, with Ramo-Wooldridge responsible for systems integration; Convair's role would be restricted to manufacturing
caption: Schriever addressed a session of the Scientific Advisory Board in 1955. In the front row (left to right) are George McRae, Charles Lindbergh, Thomas S. Power, Trevor Gardner, John von Neumann, Harold Norton, Guyford Stever and Clark Millikan
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