In the middle of the 1970’s the Air Force decided that they wanted an additional power system to keep their Minuteman Missiles ready to launch. They already had commercial electric power, diesel motor generators, and lead acid batteries running each one of the sites. But this was the height of the Cold War and they needed to make sure that they could launch a salvo, in retaliation, even if everything else in the world had been destroyed.
At this time, General Telephone and Electronics (GTE), the company I worked for, was doing research on a promising new product, lithium batteries. So the Air Force and GTE teamed up to design and build a new battery for the missile system. They were like huge submarine batteries, measuring 4 feet by 3 feet by 2 feet, weighing well over two thousand pounds, and having much more power than a lead acid battery of the same size. In theory, they were an excellent power source.
However, development was slow because the chemical components, lithium and thionyl chloride, were volatile and had to be handled with extreme care. No one had ever attempted to make a battery like this before and there were no guidelines to follow. GTE built an elaborate clean room with a sophisticated air-handling unit just to manufacture and assemble these batteries. The prototypes were then shipped to Hill Air Force Base in Utah for testing.
And that is where disaster struck. A GTE field engineer, working with the batteries, was killed when one of them exploded. This tragedy shocked everyone and left everything in limbo for a long time. The Air Force had to decide whether they wanted to continue with this project and GTE had to determine what had gone wrong. After many long, bitter, and heated meetings, both sides decided to continue.
A safer method for building the batteries was proposed, and GTE began buying the necessary components for manufacturing what they hoped would be a stable, reliable, lithium battery.
That is when I got into the act. When GTE decided to continue working on this product, my boss, Ben Horn called me into his office and asked me if I would be interested in taking the batteries into the field and testing them.
I had not been working directly on the lithium battery project but I knew their history, which of course, meant that I would be very interested in testing them. But that would mean dropping whatever I was now working on and I was a little reluctant to do that.
“Ben,” I asked, “How long will the testing last and where is it going to be done?”
“I just returned from a management review meeting and they are figuring you will be on this project for three or four months. The testing will be done at a commercial test facility near the San Bernardino Mountains and the Mojave Desert in California. Let me give you a quick rundown of what took place at the meeting because there are several things you are going to object to if you don’t understand our reasoning.
“You have got to realize that the pressure on GTE is heavy. If anything goes wrong this product is dead, over, finished. Also the visibility is high; the top brass at the Pentagon, and even their bosses, are aware of the upcoming tests. So this operation has to run smoothly and be successful.