As background, I reread an account of what is probably the most definitive history of stealth to date: Skunk Works, the story of Lockheed Martin's super-secretive special projects facility, as told by the guy who had run it for 16 years, Ben Rich.
In the summer of 1976, America's leading radar expert, Professor Lindsay Anderson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, arrived at what was then the Lockheed Skunk Works in Burbank, California, with a bag of ball bearings in his briefcase. The ball bearings ranged in size from a golf ball to an eighth of an inch in diameter. Rich, a grizzled veteran of Lockheed's secret projects department for more than 25 years, led Anderson to a mocked-up design of a funny-looking diamond-shaped aircraft, poised on a plinth in the middle of a blacked-out hangar. Over the course of the day, Anderson repeatedly attached the ball bearings to the nose of the aircraft, starting with the largest and ending with the smallest, while Lockheed engineers fired radar signals at it. What they were looking to measure was the radar cross section, or RCS, of the prototype aircraft, code-named Have Blue. The moment the radar picked up the ball bearing instead of the aircraft behind it was the moment its RCS could be accurately plotted.
When the test was over, Anderson zipped the bearings back into his case, left the site as quietly as he'd arrived and returned to MIT to process the data.
A few days later, Rich received a telegram from the air force chief of staff. Have Blue had been classified "Top secret — Special Access Required," a security grading reserved only for "quantum leaps" programs that jumped right over the state of the art. The first of these super-secret "black" programs had been the atomic bomb. The telegram had just pitched "stealth" into the same category of secrecy.
Have Blue's RCS had bettered every single one of the ball bearings Anderson had attached to it — even the one that was sized down to an eighth of an inch. This gave the aircraft and its operational successor, the F-117A Stealth Fighter, a radar signature equal to that of a bee-sized insect. Stealth, which up to that point had been viewed by skeptics as nothing more than puff and magic, suddenly went "deep black" — so secret that no one outside the program would ever know it was there. Lockheed had discovered a way of making aircraft invisible to radar, but the stakes were far, far higher even than that.
Soon after the late 1977 first flight of Have Blue from the U.S. Air Force's remote testing base on the dry desert lake bed at Groom Lake, Nevada, also known as Area 51, Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, flew into the facility in an unmarked jet and grilled Rich about the true significance of his firm's breakthrough. Rich put it on the line for him.
"It changes the way that air wars will be fought from now on. And it cancels out all the tremendous investment the Russians have made in their defensive ground-to-air system. We can overfly them any time at will."
"There is nothing in the Soviet system that can spot it in time to prevent a hit?" Brzezinski asked, jotting notes as he talked and listened. "That is correct," Rich replied simply. After more than three decades of standoff between the two superpowers, the realization made Carter's national security chief catch his breath. If the Russians wanted to match stealth with counterstealth, theoretically they could do it, but it would bankrupt them in the process.
Stealth had the power to end the Cold War, but it also had the power in the meantime — should the Russians realize what the Americans were up to — to trigger World War Three.
Have Blue was a strange-looking aircraft. It didn't look mean and hungry. It didn't look like the kind of plane that could start and end wars. It had the appearance of a bunch of bolted-on geometric shapes that had somehow been hammered into the vague outline of a jet. It turned out there was more than a good reason for that.
Have Blue hadn't been the creative inspiration of an aerodynamicist, but of a mathematician. Begin with what you can see, then search for what you can't. As I wrestled with the stealth feature, Marckus' words from our meeting battered around my head, forming as a dark thought with a black body and soft wings.
I had trawled the white world and found five possible pathways to antigravity: manipulating an object's mass and/or inertia; exploitation of the zero-point energy field; perturbations of the space-time continuum; faster-than-light travel; and gravity shielding. None of them was visible in the developmental activities of the U.S. aerospace industry, but just because you couldn't see them, it didn't mean they weren't there. Just as it had, or hadn't been with stealth a decade and a half earlier. Ben Rich and I had sparred on a number of occasions on the stealth question — most recently at an air show where he'd turned up, desperately ill with cancer, to promote his book. I'd respected him utterly and liked him hugely, sensing in his presence the grit and wisdom of a generation of postwar aviation pioneers that wouldn't be around us for much longer.
It was Rich who'd once told me of a place — a virtual warehouse— where ideas that were too dangerous to transpose into hardware were locked away forever, like the Ark of the Covenant in the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark. It had almost happened to stealth.
By starting with stealth, something that I knew about, something I could see, maybe I could pick up traces of that energy, the friction that astronomers looked for when hunting down black holes.
In the year ahead, the calendar of aerospace and defense events showed that I had multiple excuses for visiting the States — to look for the selfgenerated heat of a buried antigravity effort's interaction with the real world.
As I sat behind my desk, calling contacts and sources in an effort to plug holes in the incomplete, still highly secret history of stealth, I could hear the faint echo of a signal. It was almost impossible to decipher, but the cold side of my training, the part I kept separate from the muffled wing beats of the creature let loose upon my thinking by Marckus, said antigravity had something to do with the shared origins of the two most powerful weapons of the 20th century — stealth and the atomic bomb.
Have Blue would never have happened, but for the work of a retired Lockheed math guru named Bill Schroeder and a Skunk Works software engineer named Denys Overholser. Schroeder revisited a set of mathematical formulae originally derived by Maxwell and refined by a turn-ofthe-century German electromagnetics expert called Arnold Johannes Sommerfeld. Between them, these two physicists predicted the manner in which a given geometric shape would scatter or reflect electromagnetic radiation. A Russian, Pyotr Ufimtsev, honed their work into a more simplified set of equations in the early 1960s, but Ufimtsev could only apply the equations to the most basic geometric shapes. Schroeder's and Overholser's breakthrough had been to take Ufimtsev's concept and apply it to the inherently complex form of an aircraft, rejecting the regular smooth, curved lines of aerodynamic aesthetics in favor of a set of ugly flat, angled panels. If an aircraft could be broken down into hundreds, maybe thousands of these two-dimensional shapes, if each flat surface or "facet" could be angled in a way that would reflect an incoming radar beam away from its source, and if the combined shape could still create lift, then a true "stealth" aircraft was possible.
The irony, of course, was that stealth was in part a Soviet invention. The Soviets had allowed Ufimtsev's paper to be published, because no one east of the Iron Curtain had entertained the idea that such a complex set of equations could ever be applied to an aircraft. It had taken Overholser to pick it out from hundreds of other ponderous Soviet science texts and draw the necessary conclusions.