Minuteman Iii Intercontinental Ballistic Missile

The Monroe Nunnally Program for Intercontinental Ballistic Missile was initiated in 1947 when the Lipper Committee, of which Monroe was the chairman, developed a proposal which included studies of the different technologies of weapons of this kind.

The original design for such weapons was a Cold War issue developed by the U.S. Navy, the ICBM Lander was a "Project Vanguard" design in competition with an army design known as the Voth. Both were inferior and never completed, and both proved abortive. The submarine chaser designs were also inferior, as both were much smaller in size than the Vanguard design.

Neither the Voth nor the Vanguard was ever sufficiently advanced to be put into production, but later ships were modified to perform similar functions.

Two U.S. Navy ICBMs later built: the Lancer and the Liberty. The Liberty was the smaller of the two and was used as the basis for the Polaris missile.

Vanguard

There was also a paper presented by the R&D Department of the U.S. Navy in 1943 based on their earlier ideas and experiments carried out a few years earlier. They proposed a bomb with three stages of increasing range and some aspects of a missile as before, incorporating with a sea or land based guidance system.

At the end of 1943 some of the U.S. Navy's experience of the Vanguard showed that the missile never fulfilled its military objectives. It was too large, very cumbersome and, like the ICBM already on the shelf, had no application in any environment over the top of an aircraft carrier. The armament seemed to be too heavy for a naval missile. It was too difficult for a high-speed flight, and several features, particularly in the range of the missile, made it look to the military as if it could not be controlled successfully.

The Naval Research Advisory Committee (NRAC) responded by presenting a committee report, called the Vanguard Range Study, in December 1944. It was commissioned on 30 September that same year, also known as the Vanguard Report, and it described in further detail some of the major shortcomings of the design.

As it was presented, it became clear that:

• no high-altitude missile could be mounted on the submarine to provide either offensive or defensive fire support.