Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!cbnews!military From: military@cbnews.ATT.COM (William B. Thacker) Newsgroups: sci.military Subject: Military Procurement Follies (Canada style) Message-ID: <6074@cbnews.ATT.COM> Date: 29 Apr 89 01:24:19 GMT Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories Lines: 89 Approved: military@att.att.com From: sun!portal!cup.portal.com!mmm Lest anyone think the U.S. government has a monopoly on stupidity, consider this story about Canadian progress in warship technology (quoted from PIECES OF THE ACTION by Vannevar Bush): "One of his [Geoffrey Nathaniel Pyke] proposals was for an ice island, to be called "Habakkuk" to float in the Atlantic as a way station for transatlantic planes and a home base for planes hunting submarines. There were many wild ideas of this sort about, but this one took an unusual course. The story as quoted from a journalist, Wilfrid Eggleston, in his account of the Canadian war effort [SCIENTISTS AT WAR], goes as follows: 'An inventor with a goatee beard produced a hundred page report on a scheme called Habakkuk, and presented it to Lord Mountbatten, Chief of the Combined Operations. Mountbatten sat up in bed until noon reading it.' I doubt if Mountbatten ever stayed in bed that long at any time during the war, but he certainly bought the scheme, hook, line, and sinker. Shortly thereafter Churchill also became convinced and, in characteristic language, sent a memo to the Chiefs of Staff Committee for urgent action. I cannot discover that there was ever a favorable report on the scheme from competent engineers anywhere. But Churchill in his memo passed on some bright ideas of his own as to how an island could be made by cutting a piece from an ice floe in the Arctic and fitting it with propulsion equipment, antiaircraft defense, and so on. I had heard that such a scheme was alive, and some of the details as it began to take form. It was, as Eggleston remarks, "audacious and unorthodox." When I discussed it with engineers in O.S.R.D., as I was bound to do if I wanted to avoid surprise, they evidently thought I had some obscure reason for testing their hardheadedness. The plan was to involve a block of ice, reinforced with wood splints or straw, 2000 feet long, 300 feet wide, and 200 feet thick. This latter dimension was a minimum. The block really should be much thicker, for an elevation of thirty feet or so above the surface would hardly prevent storm waves from washing over it. As the plan developed, it included diesel engines to propel the ice block, a refrigerating plant aboard to keep the ice frozen in the warm waters of the Atlantic, workshops, living quarters, etc. Submarines could knock chips off the thing with torpedoes, but presumably they could be frozen back on. I knew I was bound to hear of this confection officially, although not in the manner in which notification actually occurred, and I knew this notification could cause trouble. So I talked to some of my friends in the Navy. They had long considered an island for aircraft, but not an island made of ice. Their plan involved a steel structure with long cylindrical floatation members so that its platform would be well above the waves, but they had sidetracked the plan on the ground that even such a structure would be too vunerable. I told them they had better get it out of the files and polish it up as they might need it. The next thing I heard about Habakkuk was when Mountbatten and Pyke walked into my office. They had evidently just come from the White House. There was no presentation of a proposal, no request that O.S.R.D. should study one and advise on it. Rather, Pyke told me the plan was approved and just what O.S.R.D. was now to do about it. Mountbatten looked embarrassed but not nearly enough so. I listened. Then I told Pyke, no doubt with some emphasis, that I took orders from the President of the United States and from no one else, and that ended the interview. I never had any word on the subject through the very active channels which we had with British science. As I expected, it was not long before the President brought it up. He did so in the casual way in which he usually asked me about all sorts of things, and wanted to know what I thought of the idea of an ice island. I told him, "I think it is bunk. If we want an island, the Navy has a far better idea for one." He never mentioned it again. He may have consulted the Navy, but I doubt it. These two short interviews probably spared this country the waste of a million man-hours of work by scientists, engineers, and technicians who had much more realistic things to do. The Canadians went ahead with the program. The National Research Council at Ottawa took it on. "The order stemmed from the highest authority, its temper was mandatory, and as a result a tremendous flurry of activity got under way in Canada," as Eggleston tells it. Much of the effort of some of Canada's most able scientists and engineers was thus used. The scheme was, of course, ultimately judged to be impractical. One could build a good aircraft carrier for the cost of a Habakkuk and it would not melt." For more information, see ENGINEERS' DREAMS by Willy Ley. That book also discusses Armstrong's proposal for islands floating on metal pontoons, which is probably the Navy design referred to above. Pyke's other great idea spawned Project Weasel, which resulted in the development of what is now called the "snowmobile". The O.S.R.D. [Office of Scientific Research and Development, of which Bush was head] did get involved with this one. Pyke's proposal was for a vehicle which would run on a pair of motor-drived Archimedean screws. This didn't work. Bush put Palmer Putnam on the project, and he invented a mechanism based on mini-Caterpillar treads. I saw a device similar to the original Pyke idea last year when those whales were trapped in the ice up in Alaska. Exxon has a small ice breaker which climbs up onto the ice using a pair of Archimedean screws, then breaks through the ice using its own weight.