12 BOEING FRONTIERS / OCTOBER 2013 historical perspective days of THUNDER Douglas Aircraft’s Thor missile served as nuclear deterrent before ICBMs By Henry T. Brownlee Jr. In Norse mythology, Thor was the god of thunder, wielding a mighty hammer that flashed lighting across the sky. It was a fitting name for the first operational ballistic missile deployed by the U.S. Air Force. The Thor missile, developed in the 1950s by Boeing heritage company Douglas Aircraft, never had to wield its own hammer—a nuclear warhead—but it served as an early nuclear deterrent before the development of longer-range intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) such as Minuteman. Thor also left an important legacy. It was modified to become the highly successful Delta launch vehicle, an eventual family of Boeing rockets that continue to hurtle military and commercial satellites into orbit to this day—satellites that make possible everything from global communications to forecasting the weather. The single-stage, liquid-fueled Thor was designed as an intermediate-range
Frontiers October 2013 Issue
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