How does one deliver a nuclear warhead?

In the early 1950s this was a tricky and very secret matter. Navy, Army, Air Force, and later NASA were all competing for a solution. The German rocket engineers brought over under Operation Paperclip — Nazis, most of them, with a handful of ideas and an unnerving appetite for work — helped figure it out.

The photographs were made to reassure: clean, vertical, triumphant. The same upward gesture that would later carry men to the moon. Lined up thirteen in a row, they slowly become what they always were — a catalogue of ways to reach Moscow. The moon came later, and largely as a cover story.