Polaris was not simply the coming together of several ripe technologies, the inevitable outcome of technical progress. Nor did it just appear ready-made in response to a national call to arms. In retrospect, a submarine-launched ballistic missile seems an obvious enough technology, providing as it does a method of basing nuclear-armed missiles that is relatively invulnerable, both to enemy attack and to domestic protest. However, in the early 1950s it was far from obvious that ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads over the desired range could be deployed in submarines.

THE WRONG STUFF

Indeed if any missile was going to carry nuclear warheads from submarines, or anywhere else for that matter, to the Soviet Union, it was the conventional wisdom in the decade following World War II that it would be a cruise missile not a ballistic one. In the United States dominant opinion considered ballistic missiles to be the more difficult technology, something to be considered in, say, twenty years time, when the technology had matured. For the time being, cruise missiles, analogues of the German VI rather than the V2, were thought most promising. Both types of missile had, of course, been brought to fruition as weapons by the Germans. The VI ‘doodlebug’ was essentially a pilotless aircraft powered by a jet engine capable of carrying a 1 ton warhead a distance of about 150 miles.