By the early 1950s, Army planners were faced with a quandary; namely,
how to meet the Soviet threat to western Europe without fielding
equivalent conventional forces, which was fiscally and politically
impossible. The development of a new generation of physically small
nuclear weapons held the promise of deterring the Soviets without
having to match them in troops and armor. The service would become
increasingly occupied with the concept of a nuclear battlefield where
atomic arms would be used liberally. A whole range of tactical weapons
would be fielded, ranging from atomic demolition charges and recoilless
rifles up to missiles. The Honest John would be the first of these.
The Honest John system was comprised of an unguided rocket launched
from a truck-mounted rail, with the main propulsion coming in the form
of a solid motor. Small motors at the midsection of the airframe were
fired to impart a spinning motion, which the tailfins then maintained
to stabilize the missile. Honest John's nuclear charge was a W31
warhead, similar to that of the Nike-Hercules. In the SSM model, the
warhead had an early “dial a yield”
feature that
allowed the yield to be adjusted to match the target requirements. A
1,500lb high explosive warhead was also an option.
Work on a revised model was begun early on, and the resulting MGR-1B
entered service in the early 1960s. Despite Lance's arrival in the
early 1970s, Honest John continued to serve with Army Reserve and
National Guard units until phased out in 1982. The United Kingdom also
operated the Honest John.