phones16 and television.

1942-1945: Head of the scientific research institute of the Ministry for Post and Telecommunications.

F. Zeiler

[Source: DY 30/3732, SAPMO-Bundesarchiv, BerlinLichterfelde. Translated by Paul Maddrell.]

***

DOCUMENT No. 3

SED First Secretary Walter Ulbricht to CPSU First Secretary Nikita S. Khrushchev, 25 September 1958

25 September 1958

To the First Secretary of the CC of the CPSU Comrade N. S. Khrushchev

Dear Comrade Nikita Sergeyevich!

On the occasion of the international congress on electron microscopy in West Berlin, our Professor Manfred von Ardenne spoke with the former head of radar of the West German enterprise Telefunken, as well as with American experts on electronics. Their conversations touched on defense against long-range ballistic rockets. Professor von Ardenne is of the view that it would be necessary to make a protective surface for the rocket hull, which switches off the radar detection.

In the enclosure I pass on to you the ideas of Professor von Ardenne.

With friendly greetings,

W. Ulbricht.

Enclosure

Highly confidential!

Subject: Defense against long-range ballistic rockets with nuclear payloads

At an international scientific congress, conversations took place with leading scientists from Washington in the field of radar technology and electronics. In these conversations the Americans talked very openly about the above-mentioned topic. It transpires that in leading

ballistic rockets will be possible, using counter-rockets charged with atomic explosive. The idea is that both the incoming ballistic rocket and its flight path are detected in good time by "long-range" radar sets. Then, in fractions of a second, electronic calculating machines calculate all the quantities which are necessary for the unerring control of the defensive rocket. That is as far as the American information goes, which in view of the current state of technology reveals very natural development trends.

The following technical conclusion, drawn by us from these conversations, seems important, since taking it promptly into account could be crucial for future military potential. This technical conclusion is [that] we must expect the opposite side to introduce the following developments. That is to say, [we must] make our own study of these questions, and we should begin the following developments at once:

Structuring long-range ballistic rockets in such a way that during their flight outside the Earth's atmosphere they can no longer be detected by "long-range" radar sets. This could be achieved if, from the time the rocket broke out of the atmosphere until it re-entered it-therefore during its flight in a vacuum- —a screen, equipped with a surface which absorbed the radar waves, were automatically to appear and open up on the rocket's head: Such surfaces are in fact already known. However, owing to their structure, [the screen] would be destroyed by air friction as the rocket broke out of the atmosphere. Hence, the suggestion that the screen first be opened out after breaking out of the atmosphere. The method described would make a sufficiently precise analysis of the flight path of an incoming rocket impossible.

15 September 1958

[Source: DY 30/3733, SAPMO-Bundesarchiv, BerlinLichterfelde. Translated by Paul Maddrell.]

Dr. Paul Maddrell is a Lecturer in the History of International Relations at the University of Salford, Manchester (U.K.).

'These reports are today to be found in the archive of the office of Walter Ulbricht, First Secretary of the GDR's Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, or SED) and Deputy Prime Minister, at the Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR im Bundesarchiv [SAPMO-Bundesarchiv] in

Berlin.

2 "Über die zurückkehrenden SU-Spezialisten" [concerning the returning SU-specialists]-the GDR authorities adopted the Soviet term, "specialists," for the returning scientists, engineers and technicians.

3 The Gehlen Organization became West Germany's Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst) in 1956.

4

* Minutes of the meeting of the Secretariat of the SED Central Committee on 13 July 1955, DY 30/J IV/2/3/479, SAPMO-Bundesarchiv, Berlin-Lichterfelde.

5 Obituary, The Times, 3 June 1997.

"Manfred von Ardenne, Sechzig Jahre für Forschung und Fortschritt (Berlin: Verlag der Nation, 1988), pp. 271273,295.

7"VEB" stands for "Volkseigener Betrieb" (factory owned by the people) and "RFT" for "Rundfunk-undFernmeldewesen" (radio and telecommunications technology), while "Meẞelektronik" means "measurement electronics".

8 Entry on Volmer in B.- R. Barth, Ch. Links, H. MüllerEnbergs & J. Wielgohs (eds.), Wer war wer in der DDR: Ein biographisches Handbuch (Frankfurt-am-Main: Fischer, 1995).

9 These cables were tapped from May 1955 until April 1956 and the information gathered for this cross-checking was "the tunnel's main contribution to scientific-technical information." However, the contribution of the human sources was clearly as important as that of the tunnel. For more information see David E. Murphy, Sergei A.

Kondrashev & George Bailey, Battleground Berlin: CIA vs. KGB in the Cold War (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 425.

10 In the German document: "Nach Meinung der Freunde ist es unbedingt notwendig, ihn in der DDR zu halten. Er ist über einige Entwicklungsthemen in der UdSSR gut informiert."

11

STIB/P/I/843 dated 2 June 1955, DEFE 41/142, Public Record Office (PRO), London. In this telegram David Evans, the Director of the BIO(G)'s Scientific and Technical Intelligence Branch informed the Ministry of Defense in London that, "Dr. Nikolaus Riehl ex 1037 now in West under British auspices". "1037(P) Moscow" had been the German atomic scientists' postal address in the Soviet Union.

12 STIB Interview Reports Nos. 234 & 261 on Dr. Nikolaus Riehl, DEFE 41/104 & DEFE 41/106; No. 232 on Dr. Günther Wirths, DEFE 41/104; No. 253 on Dr. Karl-Franz Zühlke, DEFE 41/106; No. 221 on Dr. Karl Zimmer, DEFE 21/ 43, PRO.

13 Fröhlich went to the West and was interrogated by British Intelligence. See STIB Interview Report No. 300 on Dr. Heinz Fröhlich, DEFE 41/107, PRO.

14 The "Deutsche Landsmannschaft" was an association of university students from the Eastern areas of the former German Reich.

15 This is a form of radio reception.

16 This is a mistake. Von Ardenne was a pioneer of electron microscopy, not of microphony.

I received today the latest issue of the Bulletin, and found it as fascinating as always.

I noted the exchange between Raymond Garthoff and T. Naftali and A. Fursenko. Perhaps I can shed a little light on a few of the technical issues raised in the article. I am currently working with a team of authors on a history of the Scud missile, and my research has touched on some of the issues raised in the recent Bulletin.

The reason why Khrushchev rejected the deployment of the Scud brigade to Cuba was more likely a technical decision than a policy decision. A Scud brigade could not be deployed by air in September 1962 whether Khrushchev wished it or not. The 8U218 launcher vehicle was simply too large and heavy for any existing Soviet cargo aircraft until the advent of the Antonov An-22 which did not enter service until later in the decade. Khrushchev probably rejected the deployment after having been told of this problem. The Cuban experience led the Soviet Army to push for the development of a light weight, air transportable version of the Scud launcher in 1963 based on this experience (the 9K73 system). Secondly, the R-1 1 M missile is called SS-1 b Scud A under the US/NATO intelligence nomenclature system, not the Scud B as mentioned in the Garthoff notes. This is worth noting as the R-1 1 M had a range of only 150 km, vs. 300 km for the Scud B (Russian: R-1 7) and is a fundamentally different system.

Related to this, Raymond Garthoff correctly pointed out the translation problems relating to the S-75 missile system from the previous article. However, the implications of this issue have not been adequately drawn out in either article. The S-75 is the Soviet designation for the SA-2 Guideline air defense missile system of the type deployed on Cuba during the crisis. In the early 1960s, the Soviets were conducting tests on this system to use it in a secondary role for the delivery of tactical nuclear warheads, much as the US Army was doing with the Nike Hercules missile. Given the missile's small conventional warhead and mediocre accuracy in the surface-to-surface role, it made no sense to use it in such a fashion with a conventional warhead. The implication that can be drawn from this document is that the Soviet Ministry of Defense was considering a secondary use of the S-75 batteries already in Cuba as a means to deliver tactical nuclear warheads. A clearer explanation should be made about the Russian word for division. The problem stems from the fact that there are actually two Russian words involved, diviziya and divizion. These two words are an endless source of confusion when dealing with military units in Russian, and the problem crops up in other Slavic languages as well, including Polish. The Russian word diviziya means a division or other large unit, divizion means a battalion or other small unit. I am sure that Raymond Garthoff understands this distinction, but his

explanation was not very clear, especially to readers who may not be familiar with Russian.

On some other missile issues: the S-2 Sopka was known by the US/NATO nomenclature SSC-2b Samlet and was a Navy coastal defense version of the Mikoyan KS-1 Kometa (AS-1 Kennel) air-launched 2nti-ship missile. The FKR-1 Meteor was known by the US/NATO nomenclature SSC-2a Salish, and was a Soviet Air Force surface-tosurface version of the same Mikoyan missile. Although both systems used a related missile, the FKR-1 missile used inertial guidance and was armed exclusively with nuclear warheads, while the S-2 missile used active radar guidance and was usually armed with a large shaped-charge high explosive warhead. The two systems also differed in their launchers and support equipment, the S-2 Sopka using a four-wheel semi-trailer, and the FKR-1 Meteor using a longer semi-fixed ramp.

These details are worth noting as there has been continuing confusion over these missiles in accounts of the crisis. This confusion is not confined to historians of the crisis. It would appear that US intelligence was unaware of the FKR-1 Meteor configuration of this missile at the time of the missile crisis, and considered all of these missiles deployed in Cuba to be the conventionally armed anti-ship version. As a result, there was apparently no attempt to have them removed along with the other Soviet nuclear-capable missiles. Indeed, there is some evidence that the nuclear-capable FKR-1 Meteor missiles remained in Cuba after the crisis. I am not suggesting that their warheads remained there. But considering that more than half of the nuclear warheads deployed to Cuba were intended for this system, it is surprising that this weapon has received so little attention in recent accounts of the missile crisis. I think that some of this lack of attention has been due to this confusion over the nature and role of the different types of cruise missiles deployed on Cuba.

Sincerely,

Steven Zaloga Stamford, CT

Response by Raymond Garthoff

I welcome Steven Zaloga's commentary on my article, in particular his correction in identifying the R-11M as the Scud-lb (or Scud A) rather than the Scud-1c (Scud B). The history on which he is working will be most welcome, in particular inasmuch as Western publications almost always have used only NATO designations without relating them to the designations used in Soviet archival documents.

The suggestions that Krushchev's decision not to send such missiles to Cuba was probably owing to the technical consideration that the system could not have been sent by air is, I believe, not supported. Indeed, as the Memorandum of 6 September points out, neither could the Luna system-yet it was sent to Cuba, by ship. The R-11M could equally well have been sent by ship, as were the SS-4 and SS-5 missiles and all the warheads.

Mr. Zaloga's suggestion that the discussion of possible employment of the S-75 (SA-2) surface-to-air missile system as a surface-to-surface tactical delivery system in that same Memorandum implied that the Ministry of Defense was "considering" its possible use as a means of tactical nuclear weapons delivery is, I believe, well taken. Both by technical qualities, which he notes, and by virtue of its inclusion in a memorandum discussing possible tactical nuclear reinforcement, it would seem that the Ministry was drawing attention to an additional possible tactical nuclear delivery capability. It was not, however, followed up and no tactical nuclear warheads for converted S-75 missile delivery were sent to Cuba.

Mr. Zaloga reiterates the distinction between diviziya (division) and divizion which I had noted. I am puzzled why he did not find my statement of the distinction sufficiently clear. I noted that divizion was not "division," but in artillery and missile elements referred to a battalion sized unit. I even illustrated the point by noting "The air defense missile units in Cuba comprised two divisions (divizii), with 24 subordinate battalions (diviziony)." I thought I had made the distinction quite clear.

Mr. Zaloga spells out very well the differences between the naval coastal cruise missile system Sopka (SSC-2b Samlet) and the Air Force surface-to-surface tactical ground support FKR-1 (SSC-2a Salish). He further notes the confusion of some commentaries on the Cuban missile crisis, and apparently of US intelligence analysts at the time, in not recognizing the presence of the nuclearcapable FKR-1 cruise missile system in Cuba. He is quite right. I did not go into this subject in my brief article accompanying the translated archival documents, but perhaps I should at least have made reference to an extensive discussion of the matter in my recent article on "US Intelligence in the Cuban Missile Crisis," in Intelligence and National Security (Vol. 13, No. 3, Autumn 1998), in which (pp. 29, 41 and 51) I explained that US intelligence analysts at the time had detected 100-115 crated cruise missiles in Cuba, but had failed to realize that

only 32 were for the 4 Sopka naval coastal defense barriers (with 8 launchers, four missiles per launcher), and that the other 80 with nuclear warheads-were loading of five each for 16 FKR cruise missiles launchers in 2 ground support air force regiments. It is only since 1994 that we have had first the testimony of former Soviet officers and the archival documentation establishing the presence of the FKR with tactical nuclear warheads for that system.

Indeed, as I noted in that article, if US intelligence had in 1962 correctly identified the presence of the two different cruise missile systems, and the presence of about 100 tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba (80 warheads for the FKR cruise missiles, 12 for Luna rockets, 6 IL-28 bombs, and possibly 4-6 naval mines), "uncertainties over whether they all had later been removed would have seriously plagued the settlement of the crisis" (p. 29, and see 53-53). This may be one time when less that perfect intelligence was a boon. In any case, clarifying these matters now is surely important to a correct historical evaluation of the whole missile crisis.

Raymond L. Garthoff Washington, DC