Pershing II

• 1. Introduction

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  Pershing II is the missile the United States Army test-launched for the first time on the 22nd of July 1982, from Launch Complex 16 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Martin Marietta built it to replace the Army's older Pershing 1a as its main nuclear-capable theater weapon. It entered service in 1983. The Pershing 1a's warhead was, by the Army's own assessment, far more powerful than its quick-reaction mission required. Reducing that power meant the replacement had to hit its target with a precision the older missile never needed. That single trade, less explosive force for more precision, would shape how the new missile was guided. It also shaped where the missile could be built and based, and how people on both sides of the Atlantic responded once it arrived. This documentary follows that missile from the drawing board to its final years in Europe, and to the unexpected places its parts ended up afterward.

• 2. A Warhead Problem

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  The Pershing 1a's warhead carried a yield of 400 kt, well beyond what the Army needed for its quick-reaction alert role. Development of a replacement began in 1973. Cutting the warhead down created a new problem. A smaller yield could only destroy hardened targets, like command bunkers, if accuracy improved a great deal. Martin Marietta won the development contract in 1975, and Israel's request to buy the missile was rejected that same year. The first test launches followed in 1977.

  The Soviet Union began deploying the RSD-10 Pioneer, which NATO called the SS-20 Saber, in 1976. Its first version had a range of 2700 mi and carried two warheads. In response, the requirement for Pershing II changed to extend its range to 900 mi, enough to reach targets in eastern Ukraine, Belarus, or Lithuania. NATO's Double-Track Decision paired the Pershing with a second, slower weapon, the BGM-109G Ground Launched Cruise Missile, to strike targets farther east. With its longer-range motors, the missile was briefly called Pershing II Extended Range before reverting to its original name.

  The finished missile could carry either of two warheads. The W85 offered a variable yield of 5 to 80 kt, while the W86 was designed as an earth-penetrating bunker buster. Both warheads sat inside a maneuverable reentry vehicle with active radar guidance, reusing the Pershing 1a's existing rocket motors. In 1980, the Army cancelled both the hard-target capability and the W86 warhead, so every production Pershing II carried the W85 instead. A separate concept, a warhead using kinetic energy penetrators for counter-airfield strikes, never materialized. Cancelling those options still left the missile needing one thing: a guidance system precise enough to make a smaller warhead worth building.

• 3. Finding the Target

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  The guidance and control section carried two separate systems. A Singer-Kearfott inertial navigation unit provided backup guidance, while a Goodyear Aerospace active radar system served as the primary terminal guide. Using radar maps of the target area, the Pershing II achieved an accuracy of 30 m circular error probable. If the radar guidance failed, inertial guidance alone kept the missile on target, though with reduced accuracy.

  The radar system worked by a technique called radar area correlation. At a set altitude, the radar activated and began scanning the target area, comparing live video to reference scenes stored before launch. The analog signal was digitized into two-bit pixels and formatted into a 128 by 128 array. Reference data, prepared the same way, filled a larger 256 by 256 array in memory. That array was split across four altitude bands to match the reentry vehicle's descent. The system repeated this comparison several times within each band, updating the inertial guidance right up until just before impact. If the correlator failed or the data proved poor, inertial guidance continued on its own.

  Goodyear also built the equipment that prepared this targeting data: the Reference Scene Generation Facility, a truck-mounted shelter controlled by a DEC PDP-11/70 computer. Radar maps of potential target areas were stored on disk. For a given mission, the relevant data was copied onto a quarter-inch cartridge inside a hardened carrier. During countdown, crews plugged that cartridge into the launcher's control panel to program the missile. That radar-guided precision was real. What Soviet analysts believed about the missile's reach was not.

• 4. Miscalculating Moscow

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  The Pershing II's actual range was 1770 km. Soviet estimates put the figure much higher, at 2500 km, and Soviet planners also believed the missile carried an earth-penetrating warhead. Both beliefs were wrong, but together they fed a real fear in Moscow that the weapon could be used to decapitate the Soviet Union. In reality, firing from positions in West Germany, the Pershing II could not reach Moscow at all. Whatever Moscow believed about the missile's reach, NATO's own governments still had to decide exactly how many of these weapons would cross the Atlantic.

• 5. Deployment and Resistance

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  On the 12th of December 1979, NATO's Foreign and Defence Ministers met in Brussels and adopted the Double-Track Decision. They resolved to deploy 108 Pershing II launchers to Western Europe, replacing the existing Pershing 1a launchers, alongside 464 BGM-109G cruise missiles. West Germany's Air Force had separately planned to swap its 72 Pershing 1a missiles for a shorter-range Pershing 1b, but that swap never happened. On the 26th of August 1987, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl made a pledge. He promised to unilaterally dismantle the missiles if the United States and the Soviet Union scrapped all their INF weapons.

  The first Pershing II launchers arrived in West Germany in late November 1983. Deployment finished in late 1985, reaching the full total of 108 launchers. Initial Operational Status came on the 15th of December 1983, when A Battery, 1st Battalion, 41st Field Artillery Regiment activated at its site in Mutlangen. On the 13th of December 1985, the West German government announced that the US Army's 56th Field Artillery Brigade was fully equipped. Its 108 launchers were spread across three battalions, at Neu-Ulm, Mutlangen, and Neckarsulm.

  The arrival of these missiles, and the cruise missiles alongside them, set off some of the largest protests of the Cold War. Many were organized by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Demonstrations against a related short-range weapon, the MGM-52 Lance, had already begun in July 1981 in Engstingen. By October 1981, some 300,000 protesters had gathered in Bonn. European Nuclear Disarmament launched its own campaign in 1982, and the Seneca Women's Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice formed in 1983.

  That same year, protesters went to court, arguing the deployment violated Article 26(1) of West Germany's Basic Law, which barred preparation for offensive war. The Federal Constitutional Court rejected the claim. In October 1983, Bonn saw as many as 500,000 protesters. Demonstrators formed a human chain stretching from the US Army headquarters in Stuttgart to the gates of Wiley Barracks in Neu-Ulm. Because it was easy to reach, protest efforts focused on the Mutlangen Missile Storage Area. That focus lasted from Easter 1983 until the INF Treaty was signed in 1987.

  Some activists went further than marching. On the 14th of July 1983, members of the Plowshares movement entered the Avco plant in Wilmington, Massachusetts, and damaged equipment tied to the Pershing II and MX missile programs. On the 4th of December 1983, four Plowshares activists cut through a fence at Schwabisch Gmund and damaged a truck. On the 22nd of April 1984, eight activists entered the Martin Marietta Aerospace plant in Orlando, Florida. They damaged Pershing II components and a Patriot missile launcher, and poured containers of their own blood over the equipment. On the 12th of December 1986, four more activists entered the missile storage area at Schwabisch Gmund, damaged the tractor of a Pershing II erector launcher, and hung a banner over the truck. Not every dramatic day at a Pershing site was staged by protesters outside the fence. Some accidents came from within the Army's own units.

• 6. Two Accidents

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  On the 24th of September 1984, soldiers of the 1st Battalion, 41st Field Artillery were on a field exercise near Mutlangen. A launcher and its MAN tractor, parked at the edge of a dirt road, slid off and rolled over into deep snow. It took a six-hour operation to recover the equipment.

  A far more serious incident followed months later. On the 11th of January 1985, a fire broke out at Camp Redleg, a site near Heilbronn. Three soldiers of C Battery, 3rd Battalion, 84th Field Artillery Regiment were killed. The blaze started while a missile stage was being removed from its storage container during an assembly operation. Investigators traced the cause to the Kevlar rocket casing itself, which had built up a triboelectric charge in the cold, dry weather. As the motor came out of its container, that charge discharged, created a hot spot, and ignited the propellant. The Army halted all missile movement through late 1986, until new grounding and handling procedures were introduced. Ballistic covers were later added to both the Pershing II and the remaining Pershing 1a missiles.

  The fire also renewed public protest, this time framed around safety rather than politics alone. On the 19th of April 1985, the Army told Congress that a security review had followed the explosion. That review found the missiles "extremely vulnerable" to terrorist attack, and the Army asked for funds to secure them inside concrete sheds. The 56th Field Artillery Command worked closely with local authorities, the press, and protest group representatives to keep them informed. Three years later, a treaty signed far from Mutlangen would settle the missile's fate for good.

• 7. After the Treaty

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  The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was ratified on the 27th of May 1988, and the Pershing systems began to be eliminated soon after. Withdrawal started in October 1988. By May 1991, the last missiles had been destroyed at the Longhorn Army Ammunition Plant near Caddo Lake, Texas, their motors static-burned and then crushed. West Germany's own Pershing 1a missiles were not directly covered by the treaty's terms. Even so, they were unilaterally scrapped that same year, with the actual destruction carried out in the United States.

  The treaty only required the destruction of launchers and rocket motors, not the warheads themselves. The W85 units that had armed the Pershing II were removed, modified, and reused inside the B61 nuclear bomb. Other parts of the missile survived too. The Orbital Sciences Storm I target missile used air vanes salvaged from the older Pershing 1a. The Pershing II's own guidance section went on to guide the Coleman Aerospace Hera and the Orbital Sciences Storm II target missiles.

  Seven inert Pershing II missiles were allowed to survive whole, set aside under the treaty for display. One stands today in the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., beside a Soviet SS-20. Another sits in the Central Armed Forces Museum in Moscow, also paired with an SS-20, while assorted inert Pershing 1 and 1a missiles remain on view across the United States and Germany.

  Scrap metal from destroyed Pershing II and SS-20 missiles took on stranger second lives. Sculptor Zurab Tsereteli used sections of both missiles for the dragon in Good Defeats Evil, a 39 ft, 40 ST bronze statue of Saint George. The Soviet Union donated the statue to the United Nations in 1990, and it now stands at UN Headquarters in New York City. The following year, Leonard Cheshire's World Memorial Fund for Disaster Relief sold badges made from the same scrap material. The Parker Pen Company built a line of pens from missile fragments, giving half the proceeds to the fund.

  On the 4th of November 1991, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library opened in Simi Valley, California. Five living presidents attended: Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, George Bush, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan. Parker gave each man a black ballpoint Duofold Centennial pen. Its crown was shaped from scrap Pershing and SS-20 material and stamped with the Presidential seal, alongside a walnut box engraved with all five names.

  In 2000, a group of former Pershing missile soldiers began seeking out old colleagues and collecting artifacts from the program's history. That effort grew into the Pershing Professionals Association, incorporated in 2004 to preserve and interpret the story of the Pershing systems for later generations. Veterans of the 2nd Battalion, 4th Infantry Regiment, who had guarded the missile sites, formed their own subchapter, the Pershing Tower Rats. The two German Air Force missile squadrons organized a group of their own, the Flugkorpergeschwader 1 eV. That squadron and the Tower Rats still gather, after the missile was reduced to museum pieces, a bronze sculpture, and a handful of presidential pens.