Project Thumper

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. It was contracted by the US Army Air Force in March 1946 with the University of Michigan's Aeronautical Research Center (MARC). A similar effort, Project Thumper, started at General Electric.

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. They moved to the US Air Force with that force's creation in fall 1947. Due to budget constraints, Thumper was cancelled in 1949 and its funds re-directed to the GAPA project. 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. 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.

In 1955 the Army announced its intention to develop a new anti-ICBM system based on its Nike systems. 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. The Air Force called Wizard the "Top Defense Missile" in 1957. 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. In 1959 the Air Force cancelled Wizard, stating that any ABM system was less cost effective than building more ICBMs. These arguments would also be directed against Zeus, which was cancelled in 1963.

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