John & Pat Vaughan celebrated their 50th Wedding Anniversary on September 7, 2013. The party was given by the Vaughan children at Army Navy Country Club Arlington, VA which is where the original reception was held. Family and friends came from far and near to congratulate the Vaughans. It was a a fabulous time. After the party a bunch of us went on a night tour of Washington, DC. The next day we attended mass at Holy Trinity, visited Arlington Cemetery, & the Air Force Memorial. We finished the day by celebrating Graham's 16th birthday. It was an incredible weekend! Thank you all!

 

10.  Those Amazing German Rocket Scientists 

There were many top-secret things going on from 1944 thru 1970 involving an elite and semi-secret group of smart German rocket scientists. In 1944 my dad was involved at the very beginning in the first (and as far as I know never openly documented) attempts to extract some of these top people before the Russians got to them. I got to use my top-secret clearance when I worked in the Advanced Plans office at the Air Force Rocket Propulsion Lab (AFRPL) in 1966. It was at the very end of the secret works of those same German scientists from WW II. They personally briefed me on their Multiple Independently Targeted Reentry Vehicle (MIRV) designs and discussed their other more advanced (and scary) weapon system proposals. I was the only AFRPL person assigned to monitor their work. 

Dad was born July 3, 1907 in New York City. When he graduated from NYU in aeronautical engineering in 1929 he was blessed in being one of the first U. S. Army officers who was also an aeronautical engineer. He was also cursed to be looking for a job when the Stock Market crashed in October 1929 to start The Great Depression. Dad’s ROTC instructor at NYU was Army Major Hopkins. Dad was Hopkins’ favorite student. 

The Depression prevented Dad from working as an aeronautical engineer. At the start of World War II he was on active duty as the military commander of a CCC camp building logging roads near the New Hampshire, Vermont, and Canadian border. He then got a call which changed his life. Now Major General Hopkins had just been put in charge of building up all our aircraft production plants. He found Dad after 10 years of no contact and asked him to be his assistant. General Hopkins’ office oversaw the U.S. aircraft production as our factories went from producing 143 aircraft/month in January 1939 to over 4,000/month in January 1944. 

But Dad, like Lt. Paul Cooper and other officers in General Hopkins Washington DC based Aircraft Production Office, wanted to get closer to the actual combat of the war. Finally Cooper got to fly, and then near the end of 1944 General Hopkins said Dad could go - - on a very special and dangerous assignment. 

The Germans dominated the world in the new field of rockets but they neglected to properly focus and support these scientists until near the end because they couldn’t trust that they supported Hitler’s beliefs. But near the end of WWII, when things were not going well for Hitler, the Germans gathered 4,000 rocketeers together near Peenemunde, in North East Coastal Germany. The Germans, Russians, and the U.S. all began to recognize the importance of these scientists for the development of future weapons. 

The official and well-known effort to bring these scientists to the U.S. was Operation Paperclip, officially started May 8, 1945. President Truman gave the official order August 1945 and it finally brought people like the famous rocket scientist Wernher Von Braun to the U. S. to work at NASA. But the thinking that led up to Paperclip began a year earlier. 

Dad was chosen by Hopkins to lead the scientist extraction portion of a high risk paratrooper jump into Peenemunde in late 1944. The operation never happened and the plans were never revealed. The U.S. paratrooper unit that Dad was to go in with was wiped out at Arnhem September 17-26, 1944 where 8,000 of our 10,000 paratroopers were lost in a tragic, poorly planned operation. After Arnhem, their next mission was to be the one Dad was assigned to. Dad still got to go to Germany, in a Jeep. He was lucky again as he missed the Battle of the Bulge by days. Reference my family story on Battle of the Bulge. 

Nevertheless, finally by late 1945 three groups of rocket scientists made it to the U.S. and were assigned to White Sands Proving Grounds, N.M. The Russians got many more of these rocket scientists. 

Fast forward 20 plus years after World War II and I got to use my Top Secret clearance and meet these very same scientists. They were aging (I was only 29 years old), and yet they had the most brilliant minds I have ever worked with. Their ideas were amazing and threatening, I was glad they were on our side. Their operation was not openly known. I got to travel to where they worked at Cloudcroft, New Mexico. They didn’t travel much from New Mexico. They called themselves Office of Research Analysis, ORA. 

Our ballistic missiles were lacking after World War II compared to the Russians, who had captured or persuaded many more of these brilliant German rocket-scientists to work for them. The Russians therefore had the first satellite (Sputnik, 1957) and the first astronaut (Yuri Gagarin, April 1961), and worst of all - - the first Inter Continental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), deployed in 1958. Even after we deployed our first ICBM and built their silos, we had one noticeable problem, the Russians had a big advantage in ICBM throw weight. Their missiles were bigger, more powerful, and therefore could carry bigger payloads. 

We tried many things to catch up. I spent one year in the Solid Rocket preliminary design group at AFRPL working on a SABOT launch, where we could put a big gasket seal around our Minuteman missiles and get them moving up in the silo with a gas generator before firing the first stage rocket motor. This would allow a heavier payload. Our German scientists solved the throw weight problem for us with MIRV. Our payloads could be greatly enhanced with a payload MIRV bus with its own post-boost propulsion. Instead of one reentry vehicle (RV), each of our Minuteman missiles could have 3 RVs plus decoys, etc. Our Peacekeeper missile, decommissioned in 2005, could carry up to 10 RVs. The bus moved around in outer space to drop off its RV passengers on their own trajectories. 

The U.S. finally moved ahead of Russia in this deadly space race when we deployed the first MIRVs in 1970 on our Minuteman missiles. We first tested the MIRVs in 1968. We pulled ahead of Russia thanks to our German scientists’ designs. 

Our ICBM MIRVs are all gone now, as of June 27, 2014, when we removed the last MIRV from our Minuteman III ICBMs. These missiles now carry just one warhead, as they originally did. This move fulfilled a promise of the Obama Administration in its 2010 Nuclear Posture Review. This is supposed to enhance the stability of the nuclear balance by reducing the incentives for either side to strike first and wipe out the other countries ICBMs. This is also a step to comply with the new START treaty where U.S. and Russia reduce their nuclear warheads. 

This sounds good and hopeful. Those amazing German rocket scientists are now all gone. Dangerous thinking still exists however, as it always has. ICBMs are deployed by not only the U.S. and Russia, but also by China, France (submarine launched only), India, and Israel. Soon Pakistan and North Korea. Who is next - - Iran?? 

I was briefed by the Germans at Cloudcroft about their new weapon system designs. We were lucky during WWII that Germany was too rigid in their thinking to fully use their engineers and scientists who were a step ahead of everyone in jet propulsion, rockets, and other weapon system ideas. We were lucky again to have some of them on our side from 1945 to 1970 to help counter the Russian ICBM threat. 

Future threats will certainly come our way. Probably not from German scientists. Evil continues. Threats will emerge. Will we be surprised or be prepared, as we started to do in 1944? Will we also continue to be lucky? 

As we entered World War I and again in World War II, we said a lot of prayers. People have always done that before going into battle. We have probably always thought that God would be on our side. That’s a good feeling. 

If there is no God, it doesn’t matter as much if we pray for Him to protect our country in battle. If there is a God, then hopefully He will look kindly upon our country and bless it again as He has before. I understand that prayer is designed to draw us close to God; it is not designed to move God to our will. But still we pray. 

Our Supreme Court made its most recognized decision on January 22, 1973 in Roe vs. Wade that a woman had a right to have an abortion under the right of“privacy” of the 1868 Fourteenth amendment to the Constitution. This decision was made long before we had National Geographic Society DVDs showing that a baby in the womb squirms about, waves its arms, sucks its thumb, smiles broadly and even yawns, and feels pain.Instead, the innocent human being inside the mother’s womb was successfully argued to be tissue, part of the woman’s body, and not a human life. 

This infamous Supreme Court decision overturned state laws that the majority of the States had in various forms since even before 1868 that banned abortions except to save the life of the mother. Since this 1973 decision there have been over 60 million abortions in the U.S. If there is a God, will He now look favorably on our nation’s prayers? Do we still hold a high moral ground among nations? Sadly, I don’t believe we do. 

Adolph Hitler convinced himself and his subjects that Jews and homosexuals were other than human beings. This is self-deceit in a most extreme form. It is high time to stop pretending that we do not know what this previously civilized society of ours is allowing – and approving – with the killing each year of a million innocent human beings within their mothers. 

Just look at the picture below. The picture is an untouched photograph of a being that has been within its mother for 20 weeks. Please do me the favor of looking at it carefully… 

* Have you any doubt that it is a human being? 

* If you do not have any such doubt, have you any doubt that it is an innocent human being? 

Aristotle, Aquinas, or even the most brilliant embryologists of our era or any other era have never been able to indicate with scientific proof the point in the development of the being before which it was other than an innocent human being and, therefore, available to be legitimately killed.