Vince Houghton - Nuking the Moon - And Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Left on the Drawing Board

It wasn’t, and that’s what really led to the project’s demise in early 1944.

Since 1942—when Pyke, Churchill, Mountbatten, and crew were fretting over the U-boat threat in the Atlantic—the Allies had also been hard at work on three key developments. First was the construction of escort carriers and escort warships (usually destroyers) to keep submarine attacks at bay. The second, related to the first, but slightly different, was the dedicated antisubmarine warfare mission of the Allies in the Atlantic. Germany built 1,156 submarines during the war, and 784 (68 percent) were destroyed. Of the forty thousand or so German submariners, almost thirty thousand were killed, an attrition rate of nearly 75 percent. Finally, a dedicated code-breaking effort in Poland, Britain, and the United States had finally cracked the German Enigma machine. This allowed resupply convoys to avoid areas in which German U-boat wolf packs stalked their prey.

Across the board, things had dramatically changed for the better. The range of combat aircraft had increased so much due to the introduction of new fuel tanks that it had become possible to provide air cover for most of the Atlantic with just land-based aircraft. This was particularly true once Portugal gave the Allies permission to use its airfields in the Azores archipelago in the mid-Atlantic. The Pacific was covered also, as the Allied island-hopping campaign kept creeping closer to the Japanese main islands. It seemed increasingly likely that an invasion of Japan could be successfully conducted without the use of massive floating iceberg air bases.

AND THEN WHAT?

The infrastructure for the Patricia Lake tests was abandoned and allowed to sink to the bottom of the ninety-eight-foot-deep lake. In the 1970s, the remains of the experiment were rediscovered by some vacationing scuba divers, to the delight of the Archeology Department at the University of Calgary. In 1988, the Underwater Archeological Society of Alberta marked the test site find with an underwater monument. But if you want to commemorate the ambitious project that almost was without getting wet, you can visit a plaque on the shoreline of the lake, which was put up in 1989 by the National Research Council and the National Parks branch of Canada.

The prototype bergship was also abandoned at Patricia Lake. It took two additional summers before it melted back into nature.

In 2009, the popular Discovery Channel show MythBusters decided to take on the Habakkuk story. Here’s how Jamie Hyneman, the co-host of the show, described his interest:

Mythology, strange materials, bombproof stuff—that’s all right down our alley, so I proposed taking on the story as an episode of MythBusters . The problem was, I couldn’t convince our producers to let Adam Savage and me build an aircraft carrier. A smaller boat, however, would present its own challenges: I was pretty sure its thin pykrete hull wouldn’t be strong enough for the job. So I started thinking about how to bolster it.

There wasn’t a lot of wood pulp lying around, so Jamie and Adam made their bergship out of newspapers. Slightly different than what was used in the 1940s, but close enough. They tested the strength of their frozen newspaper concoction, and found that it was even stronger than they had imagined. For the actual build, the duo traveled to Ketchikan, Alaska, and recruited high school kids to unfold and then dunk a literal ton of local newspapers in nearly frozen water. Then they built their craft. And it worked… for the most part. In the end, the MythBusters team concluded the following about the Habakkuk story:

1. Pykrete is bulletproof—CONFIRMED. They shot both ice and pykrete with a .45. The ice shattered while the pykrete stopped the slug.

2. Pykrete is stronger than ice—CONFIRMED. Ice failed its mechanical stress test at just around 40 pounds. Pykrete supported 300 pounds of lead blocks (and could have taken more).

3. A working boat can be completely constructed with pykrete—PLAUSIBLE BUT LUDICROUS. Their test boat worked, but it was minuscule in comparison to what Geoffrey Pyke envisioned for Habakkuk. Jamie and Adam rightly noted that it would be highly impractical (an understatement) to build a monstrous aircraft carrier out of the material.

Unlike many of the plans recounted here, Habakkuk was actually a pretty good idea all told. Its key elements worked, it offered tangible tactical value, and it wasn’t disturbingly inhumane. It just wasn’t feasible, or, in the end, necessary.

Kelly Johnson could see the air.

Or at least that’s how Hall Hibbard, Johnson’s boss at the Lockheed Corporation, explained the genius of one of the greatest (if not the greatest) aircraft designers in history.

Over more than five decades at Lockheed, Johnson designed (or significantly contributed to the design of) as many as forty groundbreaking civilian and military aircraft. These included the P-38 Lightning (the first production aircraft to exceed 400 mph), the Lockheed Constellation (which redefined civilian air travel), the F-80 Shooting Star (the U.S. military’s first operational jet fighter), the F-104 Starfighter (the first fighter to exceed Mach 2, or two times the speed of sound), the C-130 Hercules (which is still in operation today—the longest-serving military aircraft in history), the U-2 (which is also still in operation today), and the A-12/SR-71 (the first production aircraft to exceed Mach 3).

From the age of twelve, Johnson knew he wanted to design airplanes. In 1933, he got his chance when he joined Lockheed—and immediately called out his new bosses, telling them that the design of their new aircraft, the Model 10 Electra airliner, was going to create dangerous instability in flight. This guy had moxie.

To their credit, the higher-ups at Lockheed didn’t send Johnson packing, but instead insisted he put his money where his mouth was: Okay, kid, you think you see a problem. Fix it.

And Johnson did. He redesigned the tail to include a double vertical configuration (resembling an H) that not only resolved the instability issue, but would also become one of the signatures of the company’s aircraft for decades to come.

From there, nothing could hold him back. By 1938, Johnson had become Lockheed’s chief research engineer. In 1952, he was appointed chief engineer of the company’s Burbank, California, plant; in 1956, vice president of research and development; in 1958, vice president for advanced development projects; in 1964, a member of Lockheed’s board of directors; and in 1969, senior vice president. He was offered the position of president three times. He turned down each one. All he wanted to do was design airplanes.

In 1955, Johnson and his team created the world’s first dedicated spy plane, the U-2, just nine months after receiving an official contract. It came in on time, and under budget.

But it was his second spy plane that made me want to become a pilot. I was going to put the modifier “as a boy” in the middle of that last sentence, but who am I kidding? The Johnson-designed Lockheed A-12/SR-71 still makes me dream. It is the most gorgeous aircraft ever envisioned. To me, nothing comes close. The A-12 (CIA version)/SR-71 (Air Force version) is a modern work of art. Not to mention one of the most extraordinarily capable aircraft ever built.

So how do you top the Blackbird?

In 1962, Johnson had an idea. The trickiest part of spy planes was keeping the pilot alive and out of enemy hands. Also, the frailty of the human body limited aircraft performance. You could design only up to the point at which you’d kill the pilot. And of course, if the aircraft gets shot down, the pilot could be captured, interrogated, paraded in front of the world as a propaganda coup for our enemies. This is exactly what happened in 1960 to American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers. It was a black eye for the United States, and a propaganda windfall for the Soviets.