Corporal
The first nuclear missile
Explosive Power
20 kt.
Hiroshima Equivalent Factor
1.33x
Dimensions
45 ft, 4 inches x 30 inches
Weight
5.5 tons
Year(s)
1954-1964
Range
30-75 miles
Purpose
First guided nuclear missile
About the Corporal
A case could be made that the United States and its Allies didn’t win World War II, we just helped the Soviet Union win it. It was the Soviets who fielded the most troops and who suffered, by nearly an order of magnitude, the most military deaths of any nation in the war. It was the Soviets who stopped the advance of the Nazi war machine, it was the Soviets who fought on their own land, their civilians dying by the tens of millions.
When Adolf Hilter took his new bride retired to their rooms down in the Führerbunker on April 30, 1945, when Eva Braun took the cyanide and then when Hilter shot himself in the head, he wasn’t worried about surrendering to the Allies. They were nowhere near Berlin. The Soviets, however, utterly defeating the last defenses of the German capital, were only a few hundred feet away.
As the ending of WWII segued smoothly into the beginning of the Cold War, all of those Soviet tanks and troops and their successes in battle were very much on the minds of NATO planners trying to figure out how to defend Western Europe from attack.
One might be forgiven for thinking that a Soviet invasion with men and tanks in the 1950s would be met with superior numbers of men and superior tanks from the United States, from West Germany, from Great Britain, and that our superiority would push them back, defeating them, teaching them a lesson for all of history. That sure would look good on the newsreels. But there were not enough men or tanks stationed in Europe to hold back a Soviet invasion for long. The Western Allies were unwinding their war economies, their armies shrinking, their thoughts of war fading.
The experience of the Korean War only underlined the difficulty of confronting large land forces far from home.
Facing Europe were those Soviet men and those Soviet tanks, so many men and so many tanks, and they were just over there, a short distance to the border of NATO countries. The Soviets didn’t need to transfer their tanks to Europe on slow, ocean-going cargo ships. They could just drive their tanks to the front. They could be ready for an invasion in a matter of weeks. They could win despite their old technology, despite their misguided form of government.
They did it to the Nazis. There was no doubt they could do it again. There was no doubt that they wanted to do it again.
So NATO came up with a plan. Faced with the threat of a large-scale invasion the NATO troops in Europe would attempt to slow the advancing Soviets while at the same time firing nuclear artillery rockets at enemy troop and tank formations behind the front lines, launching short-range nuclear missiles at airports, supply depots, ammunition dumps, communications centers, and tank concentrations beyond the range of the rockets. Robot airplanes would strike with nuclear weapons deeper behind the lines, while aircraft dropped nuclear bombs all over. This nuclear war was the policy, explicitly stated so as to be crystal clear to the Soviets, known as Massive Retaliation, by which the United States meant massive nuclear retaliation.
Neither NATO nor the United States supported a “no first strike” nuclear weapons policy because their plan was to, without any further warning, strike first with nuclear weapons when faced with overwhelming conventional enemy forces. In short, if the Russians invaded, we would nuke them, period.
In all of this, in the 1950s, the Corporal was to play the role of the short-range nuclear missile, giving way only when it was replaced by a newer short-range nuclear missile.
Gallery
Nukemap
NUKEMAP is a web-based mapping program that attempts to give the user a sense of the destructive power of nuclear weapons. It was created by Alex Wellerstein, a historian specializing in nuclear weapons (see his book on nuclear secrecy and his blog on nuclear weapons). The screenshot below shows the NUKEMAP output for this particular weapon. Click on the map to customize settings.
Videos
Click on the Play button and then the Full screen brackets on the lower right to view each video. Click on the Exit full screen cross at lower right (the “X” on a mobile device) to return.
Further Reading
- Wikipedia
- Nuclear historian Brian Burnell has an extraordinarily good page on the Corporal, covering not only the weapon and its development in clearly written detail but also does two things that are oddly rare: he offers a comparison to the relevant Soviet weaponry (in this case the Scud missile) and explains why the US military wanted this particular weapon in the first place. Well worth a look.
- Two other histories of the Corporal might be of interest: “The Corporal M2 Missile” by Peter A. Goetz in WarefareHistoryNetwork.com offers a survey of the missile’s development (and a few nice photos of the Corporal) while “The Corporal Family of Rockets and Missiles” published by the White Sands Missile Range Museum delves deeper into the pre-history of the Corporal, covering not only earlier missiles and rockets but the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s role in the research ad development of this new technology.
- The Army which, despite shortcomings of the Corporal, sees the weapon as the beginning point of later achievements, has its own history in the oddly named “Development of the Corporal: The Embryo of the Army Missile Program” and its supporting documents.
- For a sense of the weapon’s difficult birth (without diving deep into one of the histories listed above) look at the US Army’s chronology, put out by the Aviation and Missile Life Cycle Management Command. Also, as an indication of the weapon’s importance in terms of technology development, note how many times the word “first” appears.
- The Corporal was a difficult (and dangerous) weapon to use as suggested by this graduation photo from the 1952 class of the The Corporal Guided Missile Training School at White Sands–two years before the Corporal entered service. Also note this photo, made at the University of Illinois, of a mobile Corporal unit erected on campus in 1960 order to gin up interest among the students in a career in the military. This photo shows what appears to be that same missile at another location on campus.
- The folks at Jet Propulsion Laboratory had a sense of humor, it seems, and produced this humorous version of a standard Air Force reel.
- The Corporal used a W7 warhead, a modification of the Mark 7 bomb, which was also used for Honest John, BOAR, the early version of the Nike Hercules, the “Betty” nuclear depth bomb, and the ADM (Atomic Demolition Munition). [Links to American Nukes forthcoming.]