Project Wizard
Project Wizard was a Cold War-era anti-ballistic missile system to defend against short and medium-range threats of the V-2 rocket type.
Early results demonstrated that the task of shooting down missiles appeared to be beyond the state of the art, and both projects were downgraded to long-term technology studies in the summer of 1947.
Partially due to the perceived threat of Soviet long-range bombers being more serious, and that the systems still appeared to be beyond the state of the art, the Air Force later cancelled Wizard as well.
Funds from the Wizard, Thumper and GAPA concepts were all channeled into MX-606, a long-range surface-to-air missile project that eventually emerged in the late 1950s as the CIM-10 Bomarc.
The Air Force immediately re-activated Wizard as an entirely new project with Convair and RCA, and later added Lockheed-Raytheon and the Bell Labs-Douglas Aircraft team developing Nike.
In 1958, with the Army's Nike Zeus system planning to enter testing and Wizard still a paper project, The Pentagon told the Air Force to limit their work to long-range radars.
[15] By 1949 increasing budget pressures along with the success of the Army's Nike led to the Air Force's MX-606 Boeing Ground-to-Air Pilotless Aircraft (GAPA) anti-aircraft project being slated for cancellation.
At the same time the Soviet testing of a nuclear weapon and display of the Tu-4 Bull bomber placed the continental United States under the threat of attack, and attention quickly shifted away from the V-2 problem.
To save what was their only SAM project in what was rapidly becoming an area of serious concern, the Air Force cancelled Thumper and its remaining funds were re-directed to GAPA.
By June the teams' design was for a Mach 3 winged missile to intercept aircraft at 80,000 feet (24,000 m) up to 200 miles (320 km) away, eventually emerging as the CIM-10 Bomarc.
A test series in 1954 demonstrated highly favourable results from much lighter hydrogen bomb designs, and suddenly the ICBM appeared to be a very practical possibility.
[20] With this change in strategic threat from aircraft to missiles, in 1954 the Army contracted Johns Hopkins University's operational research office (ORO) to prepare a detailed report on an ABM capable of countering ICBMs.
Bell took 18 months to deliver their response, stating that recent developments in radars, and especially transistorized computers, offered the range and performance needed for the mission.
[22] The fighting soon encompassed practically every area where the Army and Air Force had competing interests, including Jupiter and Thor, Nike and Bomarc, and Zeus and Wizard.
Forming a panel to investigate the issue in August 1957, the new Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy published a lengthy report on the concept on 16 January 1958.
[21] Two months later the Air Force appealed the decision, stating that "the Army's ZEUS did not have the growth potential to handle possible enemy evasion decoy and countermeasure tactics.
