R&D:
Ill-Starred Nuclear Plane Project Is Subject of Hard Look by General Accounting
Office
A post mortem on the nuclear-powered aircraft
program, which was canceled by Presidential order in 1961 after 15 years and $1
billion had gone into the work, has opportunely appeared at a time when the TFX
affair has centered public attention on federal procurement policies and management
of research.
The review of
the so-called ANP (Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion) project was carried out by the
General Accounting Office, the auditing arm of the legislative branch, which
was created by Congress to keep tabs on how the money the legislators
appropriate is spent. Although much of the material in the GAO's review of the
Joint Atomic Energy Commission-Department of Defense project has appeared
before in Congressional hearings and committee reports, the new study, with its
detailed chronology and allocation of blame in unemotional auditor's terms,
makes a useful primer of how hot to conduct an R&D project. (A copy of the
report, Review of the Manned Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion Program, can be
obtained for $1 from the Accounting and Auditing Library, General Accounting Office,
441 G St, N.W., Washington 25.)
The GAO review
says that the ANP project suffered severely over the years from changes in
emphasis and direction in the program. Sternest criticism, perhaps, is directed
at the Department of Defense and the Air Force for failing to furnish
"sufficient and timely guidance to those responsible for carrying out the
ANP program." The record shows, for example, that an AEC request in 1948
to DOD for its views on the military worth of a nuclear-powered plane did not
receive a reply until 1951, and then only under pressure.
The report goes
on to relate how facilities costing more than $17 million were built but not
used, or little used, and how expensive design and related work was wasted. The
GAO says also that cost data obtained from prime contractors was unsatisfactory
and that unallowable costs were charged to contracts.
The veering
course which the project took and its failure to pay off in a prototype plane
or engine brought it under constant scrutiny from Congress and the Executive,
and it was subjected to a program review no less than 13 times in the last 6
years of its life. People familiar with the program in this period say these
studies tended to turn into reviews of earlier reviews and to produce
recommendations which were not put into effect.
Gao's major
recommendation for future projects like ANP is for one agency to obtain
congressional authorization for the cost of the project, since this would
eliminate the problems inherent in dual control and "facilitate
Congressional review and strengthen Congressional control."
Though many
persons in Congress and the agencies remained convinced of the feasibility and
value of the anp? Congressman Mel Price (Democrat of Illinois) is perhaps the
best known of its advocates? The
absence of visible results lost the project many supporters in Congress, and in
March 1961, shortly after President Kennedy took office, he asked
Congress to terminate the anp program because he said "the possibility of
achieving a militarily useful aircraft in the foreseeable future is still very
remote."
Congress
complied with the President's request, the project disappeared from the budget,
and the work was transferred to the aec budget as a non-defense research item.
Aec officials
say that many of the lessons learned in the work on anp, particularly in
reactor development and materials research, have proved valuable in the joint
aec-nasa work on the nuclear space program, which has a budget of about $400
million for fiscal year 1963. No agency now is working on a nuclear-powered
aircraft project.
The gao study
centers on the administrative aspects of the anp program and does not delve
deeply into matters of policy, which is quite natural in an organization
concerned with Executive agency fiscal operations and scrupulous never to
intrude in areas where its employers, Congress, may be directly involved.
The review does,
however, make the essential point that the anp project was in competition with
other defense systems, including missiles, and that over the past 15 years the
project had suffered the common fate of manned aircraft? The shift in emphasis
to missiles.
The project's
ultimately fatal flaw was the failure to solve the central problem of
developing a small, light, high-powered, adequated shielded reactor, and
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara last week underlined the point when he
told the defense procurement subcommittee of the Joint Economic Committee that
too much time and money was spent on an airplane and not enough on a reactor.
In retrospect,
the anp decision seems to have been an early example, and perhaps a classic
one, of the application of Secretary McNamara's "cost effectiveness"
analysis of major research and development programs? That combination of
technological, strategic, and budgetary considerations which Congress and the
defense contractors are now suspiciously appraising?
-John Walsh
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