I’ve been trying for a while to find a reliable insider account of the early days of Project NEPA. Helpfully, I found two accounts of Project NEPA written by Lt. Col. Clyde D. Gasser, the Air Force Engineering Officer for project NEPA in Spring 1947. Incidentally, his 1990 obituary is here, and I also found a page collecting together his thoughts on UFOs (spoiler: he thought they were Russian).
Gasser reported to (later Major General) Donald J. Keirn, the Chief of the Power Plant Laboratory at Wright Field. Keirn had previously been liaison officer to the Manhattan Project, but in May 1947 was appointed special assistant to the director of the Division of Military Application, Atomic Energy Commission (Brig. Gen. James McCormack, Jr.).
Gasser’s first account was a report on NEPA dated 30th May 1947, which – to be frank – was a load of stakeholder-facing success theatre. (Though to be fair, it does have a lot of useful details that help stitch NEPA into the broader military/AEC fabric.) The second Gasser account, however, seems to have been written during the 1960s, and tells much more of the story behind the project. Though this second account has, especially towards the end, a reek of ideological indoctrination and denial (i.e. ‘sure, the project failed, but history will prove us right‘), it is at least accessible and direct about what happened.
I also found Chapter 4 of “Race to Oblivion: A Participant’s View of the Arms Race” (1970) by Herbert F. York fairly useful, along with Lee Hite’s “Giving Wings to the Atom“.
The origins of NEPA
During WWII, the notion of nuclear powered aircraft seems to have been ‘in the air’: Enrico Fermi discussed it in 1941, and (then-Colonel) Donald Keirn certainly seems to have talked about it too. But neither of them had the political muscle to turn it into any kind of scientific R&D programme.
Project NEPA seems to have stemmed from a ‘meeting of minds’ between Army Air Force General H. H. “Hap” Arnold and much-lauded physicist Theodore von Kármán. Back then, every senior figure in the US figure was haunted by the spectre of what had happened at Pearl Harbor: they were therefore alert to any possible technology that offered them the chance to not be caught out again. So at that precise moment, von Kármán’s optimistic gloss on possible technologies was exactly what the General wanted to hear.
Arnold therefore set up a Scientific Advisory Group of the US Air Force (later the Scientific Advisory Board) headed by von Kármán. This yielded a series of short works describing the scientific state of the art in various fields relevant to the Air Force, ranging from guided missiles to aviation medicine: “Where We Stand” (von Kármán’s initial report) and “Toward New Horizons” (“Science, the Key to Air Supremacy“).
But of all of these, it was the chapter on nuclear powered aircraft (“Possibility of Atomic Fuels for Aircraft Propulsion of Power Plants” by Hsue-Shen Tsien) that seems to have captured the imaginations of Hap Arnold and his Air Force planners. For the Cold War with the Soviet Union that they could all see just starting, they came to believe that nuclear aircraft – though technologically challenging – would give the US Air Force numerous structural (and very hard to challenge) strategic advantages:
- Super-high altitude (because the thin upper air would not limit nuclear power efficiency)
- Too high to be intercepted by conventional aircraft
- Super-long endurance (missions could spend days if not weeks in the air)
- No need to manage a global set of airfields for their (conventional range) bombers to launch from
Remember that the dangers of nuclear fallout weren’t properly understood back then; and though ICBMs had been proposed, the conventional wisdom was that such missiles would be many decades away, and even then would have highly uncertain reliability or precision. For the Air Force planners peering into the future, the only decisive theatre of war they could foresee had bombers and nuclear bombs. And so nuclear aircraft seemed to them to be a logical next step (albeit a monumentally large one).
NEPA, 1946-1947
At this point, Colonel Keirn – who is essentially the hero of Gasser’s account – took the whole idea to General Leslie Groves at the Manhattan Engineering District (basically, what was left of the Manhattan Project after the war), and started to talk about it. However, the Air Force hadn’t been part of the development of the atomic bomb, and so didn’t really have sufficient technical expertise. But at this point, Fairchild Engine and Airplane Company stepped forward: and they were really, really interested in designing and building nuclear-powered aircraft. And that’s basically where it all actually started.
The initial AAF letter of intent by General Spaatz and Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves on 28th May 1946, committing $200,000 to the project (of course, this rapidly increased). Early funding for the project came from the Air Force Research and Development section, with the AEC contributing to the budget from 1949 onwards. For the first fiscal year (1946), funding was $1.3m: by 1951, this had steadily grown to $8.3m. (York p.61)
Then on 15th July 1946, the project moved into a suite of rooms in Raleigh Hotel on West 72nd St. New York City. This was briskly followed on 4th September 1946 by a move to the AEC Administrative Building in Oak Ridge (which at the time was still Clinton Laboratories): and then on 24th September 1946 onwards to Oak Ridge’s S-50 Area near the K-25 Power Plant. (Hite p.3)
This was all happening while the Manhattan Engineering District was approaching the end of 1946, at which point it was handing over some (but not all) of the atomic reins to the newly-formed civilian Atomic Energy Commission. So in February 1947, control of NEPA moved to AEC Subcommittee of the Joint Research & Development Branch (known as the JRDB).
Secrecy and Control
How was the AEC – a civilian body – able to take control of a top secret military project in February 1947? When you put it like that, it doesn’t really make sense.
My understanding is that what really happened is that because the AEC had control of key parts of atomic research (as well as the equipment and the raw materials, such as uranium), they took notional control of the project. However, military control of the project stayed with General Groves (albeit invisibly) as he sidestepped from the Manhattan Engineering District to the newly-formed Armed Forces Special Weapons Project.
The AFSWP was a joint military organisation (i.e. Army, Navy, and Air Force) that officially started on 29th January 1947. It started its life in the former offices of the Manhattan Project (the fifth floor of Washington’s New War Department Building), but on 15 April 1947 it moved to the Pentagon, where it sprawled and sprawled as it grew.
This speaks to what I dislike about the way Project NEPA is almost always presented: that the entire layer of military control via AFSWP is essentially absent. Metaphorically, if the AEC owned the NEPA house, Groves and the AFSWP had the keys (and had installed all the locks too). And I’ve read elsewhere that on anything to with secret stuff, the rest of the AEC Commissioners normally deferred to former Navy Admiral Lewis Strauss, because of his high security clearance. (Though note that Strauss had never seen action, his war was spent in the USNR working for the Bureau of Ordnance.)
Once this whole picture is reframed with AFSWP in its correct place, NEPA looks far less like a post-war experiment in civilian control and far more like a continuation of Manhattan Project secrecy culture by the back door. I just wish that even one of the 50+ articles and books I’ve read about Project NEPA had bothered to point this out. But now you know.