Development Of The Guided Missile.

Second, completely revised and enlarged edition of Kenneth W. Gatland’s survey, published for Flight magazine by Iliffe & Sons, London, with the New York imprint of the Philosophical Library on the title page (over 100 illustrations). The Author’s Preface is dated July 1954 at Whitton, Middlesex, and explains that the first edition of 1952 had grown out of a series of articles in Flight. The Foreword, dated June 1952, is by Air Chief Marshal Sir W. Alec Coryton, Chief Executive (Guided Weapons) at the Ministry of Supply in 1950–51. The jacket describes Gatland as an aircraft design engineer and a founder-member of the British Interplanetary Society.

The Introduction deals largely with Britain’s vulnerability to air attack in the Atomic Age. Nine chapters follow: Propulsion; Research and Development; The New Armament; Air-to-Air Missiles; The Guided Bomb; Problems of the Long-Range Missile (including an evaluation of Soviet missile potentialities); Rockets for High-Altitude Research; Space-Satellite Vehicles; and Interplanetary Flight. The first three of these (propulsion, research and development, and the guided bomb) are new to this edition, and the Preface notes that British projects could not be discussed because of Ministry of Supply security restrictions.

Three appendices cover telemetering systems (made possible by declassified Ministry of Supply material), notable missiles compared in scale photographs of over 40 rockets, and a table of significant powered missiles that now covers about 140 rockets from eight countries. A bibliography and index close the volume. The first frontispiece shows the Corporal surface-to-surface missile being prepared for launching, and the jacket shows a missile rising from a launcher.