National Affairs: The A-Rocket

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Three miles up in the bright blue Nevada sky, a slim rocket rigged to the underside of an F-89H twin-jet Scorpion came to fiery life, thrust loose from the speeding (around 600 m.p.h.) plane and streaked forward, far faster than sound. The F-89H banked sharply to the left to escape the coming blast. Four seconds later, a fireball flashed in the sky. It glowed for an instant like a newborn sun, then faded into a rosy, doughnut-shaped cloud.

The awe-struck watchers below had just seen military history made. For the first time, a nuclear-armed rocket had been fired from an airplane, and that event, one morning last week, opened up what the Air Force called "a new dimension" in the nation's defense against enemy bombers. The new-dimension rocket was the Air Force's MB-1, or Genie (formerly dubbed Ding Dong and High Card), manufactured by Douglas Aircraft Co. The Genie's nuclear punch, said an Air Force spokesman, is "well below nominal"—nominal meaning, in the strange new vocabulary of the Atomic Age, equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT. But even a "well below'nominal" air-to-air nuclear rocket could destroy a whole flight of enemy bombers with the smash of its shock wave.

During last week's test, four Air Force officers and a civilian stood unprotected on the ground below the point of explosion. They felt a hot blast, a rush of air and heard a thunderous roar, but their Geiger counters proved what the Air Force and the Atomic Energy Commission hopefully expected: the amount of radioactive fallout was too slight to endanger a city's population if a Genie exploded overhead.

As a weapon deadly to enemy planes high in the air and harmless to civilians in cities below, the Genie, crowed the Air Force, is "the greatest advance in air defense since radar."