Word: atlases
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...public's hopes have been raised too high," said an Air Force officer, referring to Defense Secretary Neil McElroy's prediction earlier this year that the Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile would be operational by July. A succession of five firing failures had washed out the deadline, also considerably sobered Air Force and Convair pressagents. Last week the Air Force reported with relief that an Atlas C, an advanced test model, had passed a routine countdown, then soared some 5,000 miles downrange from Cape Canaveral to deliver its one-ton nose cone with satisfying accuracy near waiting recovery...
...nearby San Quentin the warden postponed the lights-out of 11:15 p.m. until the Giants had won an extra-inning game. It was the same in Los Angeles, 350 miles to the southeast. At a rocket test site, an engineer could barely wait for the blast of an Atlas engine to subside before asking: "What's the inning and the score?" And at the Los Angeles Athletic Club, some 200 men crowded around a television set to watch the Dodgers win. Sighed one office truant: "Well, this knocks hell out of an afternoon of banking...
...Atlas. The Air Force's most advanced intercontinental ballistic projectile was scheduled to be operational in limited numbers by now, but five successive failures prompted Defense Secretary Neil McElroy to postpone the readiness date by at least 60 days (TIME, July 6). Before last week's launchings, the Air Force and Convair, the makers of the ICBM, put out word that Atlas was on the mend, and that the causes of the failures had been traced and corrected. Last week the Air Force tried four times to launch another Atlas. Because of assorted bugs, it never left...
...whopper: the $39,594,339,000 Defense Department appropriation-$346,139,000 more than the White House had asked, with the Army getting the biggest bonus. Included in the bill were an extra $380 million nuclear carrier for the Navy, $85 million more for the Air Force's Atlas missile, and $309 million for the Army's Nike-Hercules and for Army equipment modernization. The Defense Department was directed to keep the Marine Corps at 200,000 men instead of the budgeted 175,000, keep the National Guard at 400,000 instead of 360,000, the Army Reserve...
Then McElroy offered one of the strangest reassurances in military annals. The U.S. need not worry about the Atlas troubles, said he, because the Communists are having "serious trouble" with their intercontinental missile program, too. Still, the Communists are expected to get ten operational ICBMs by the end of 1959, but that was also not so "important," because the Communists would need "some hundreds," as McElroy put it, "to cream the country...