Out With Pershing, In With Sanity
The names themselves are almost poetic, and echo back from a time of nuclear brinkmanship we were very lucky to have made it through. These including the Corporal, the Sergeant, Little John and Honest John, the Nike and Chaparral. Facing NATO, of course, was just as large and diverse an arsenal of killing systems. Fortunately for us all, none of these missiles were ever deployed as they were intended -- training doesn't count.
Of all those systems, the Pershing Missile is unique, not in what it did, but by it's becoming a catalyst instrumental in not just the many (and ultimately failed) discussions about reducing our mutual means of destroying each other (us against them,can you dig it?), but something that led to actually applying a saner way of forging the future. And so, kids, with the successful adaption of the 1987 Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the Pershing joined it's Soviet counterpart in becoming the first complete nuclear system to be totally scrapped.
Within four short years of the signing of that INF document, the Pershing IA and II missiles and their accompanying support mechanisms were removed from the field and were esentially melted down.
Let's look at it for a moment, that venerable Pershing beast. First planned by the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama, the program began in 1958. The Pershing system was designed to replace the older, more cumbersome Redstone Missile, and was named after General Black Jack Pershing of Mexican boarder and World War One fame. By the early 1960s, the Pershing I system was in production, and the soldiers who would man and operate them were being trained at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma. The Army’s own designator for this particular job, by the way, was 15 Echo.
The system, in basic terms, consisted of twin solid boosters stages tipped with a relatively small single nuclear package. It was a trailer towed and launched system for “shoot and scoot” mobility.
Both the Pershing IAs and Pershing IIs were fielded in various parts of NATO as well as the United States. The difference between the I and II models, basically, focused on a more accurate inertial guidance system which allowed for much improved targeting capability and a necessarily smaller warhead. The idea, you see, was that if you could aim the bird better, you needed a smaller detonation to destroy the unfortunate downrange target.
The Pershing 1A and IIs were what you might consider tactical rather than strategic weapons. In other words, they were much more important as a means of nuclear deterrence than part of a strategic war plan, as well as the question of survivability under nuclear war conditions.
An oxymoron?
On the Soviet side, the equivalent system was called the SS-20, and, I'm sure, similar in design features and capabilities. I’m not sure the total number of these missiles or supporting equpment that were ultimately built, but it had to be in the hundreds.
Let's get back to the scrapping. As soon as the ink was dry on the treaty, positive destructive forces went to work. It was mostly a matter of firing the solid fuel stages on a test stand and then flattening the empty casings. The supporting trailers, airframes, radar assemblies and all the rest were scrapped, all under the careful eye of both US and Soviet authorities. The same thing was going on over there in Russia.
And on May 1991, the final Pershing field artillery command in Europe was deactivated; the colors were struck and cased and the men redeployed in other capacities.
So ending a long 30 year history of Pershing service in Europe. The 56th Field Artillery Brigade closed it's doors for the last time and with that, a little bit more sanity prevailed on the world.
Articles in this Topic
