Word: atlas
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...were thinking about little else but the feasibility of a nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile. Yet because of the arguments-like Bush's-against it, it was not until May 1954, just ten years ago next week, that the Air Force launched a crash program to develop the Atlas ICBM...
Flock of Birds. In the span of the ensuing decade of strategic missilery, the U.S. has accomplished one of the greatest scientific, engineering and construction feats in history. It has produced and deployed a versatile flock of big birds: the pioneering Atlas, the more powerful two-stage Titan, the stopgap IRBMs Thor and Jupiter, and those truly pushbutton solid-fueled mainstays of the nuclear arsenal, the mass-produced Minuteman and the elusive, submarine-borne Polaris...
Lowest Apogee. U.S. missiles, meanwhile, mainly blew up or fizzled like soggy Roman candles. The first Thor simply fell off its pad. In its second test, it rose ten inches, collapsed. "It must have had the lowest apogee of any missile ever fired," recalls Schriever ruefully. The first Atlas flight in 1957 failed. At one point in 1959, five consecutive Atlas firings were flops...
Schriever spent many hours rolled up in a blanket in a DC-7 shuttling to Washington to answer the complaints of congressional critics. But he kept insisting that Atlas would work, proved it by turning the first operational Atlas over to a Strategic Air Command crew late in 1959. Despite the anguish, those were exciting days. "Every damn firing was just like having a baby," Schriever says. "There was just as much emotional excitement for a success and just as much depression for a failure. Now shots are just good or bad. Missiles...
Even as the U.S. began to deploy Atlas, it pushed on to develop Titan, which could carry a heavier warhead. Yet U.S. intelligence painted a frightening picture of Soviet missile capability. Defense Department experts predicted that the U.S.S.R. could have some 400 long-range missiles by mid-1963, while the U.S. would have only about half that number. This was the so-called "missile gap," which became a 1960 presidential campaign issue. To help plug the anticipated gap, the U.S. deployed 1,500-mile Thor and Jupiter missiles in Europe, then gambled heavily on Polaris and Minuteman. Since their solid...