Word: icbms
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Capabilities. The new Minuteman ICBM is a three-stage rocket, 57 ft. long, weighing 65,000 lbs., with predicted 5,500-mile range. It is designed to pack a thermonuclear warhead smaller than that of the liquid-fueled ICBM Atlas, but big enough to take out major targets. Its major components can be broken down to make shorter-range missiles; by itself the missile's third stage could make a useful tactical ballistic missile (TBM) with 500-to 1,000-mile range; its second and third stages would combine to make a 1,500-mile IRBM for use from...
Cats & Guts. Even angrier was Thomas G. Lanphier Jr., wartime fighter pilot and vice president of Convair (prime contractor on the Atlas ICBM). The Pentagon, said Airman Lanphier, indulges in "dangerous semantics" by indicating that the Atlas will be reliably operational in the near future. Actually, said he, the Russians are two to three years ahead of the U.S. ICBM program because they have tested "hundreds" more parts. Convair could double its efforts on Atlas if the Pentagon so ordered, accelerate its B58 bomber program by three or four months and put 50 times as much work into its anti...
President George Bunker of the Martin Co. (the Titan ICBM) complained that the Pentagon has "so many people who have the power of negative endorsement" but nobody to give "an absolutely clear-cut decision that you know will stand." Titan is still on a "one-shift basis" and has not received a dollar of speedup money. Curtiss-Wright's President Roy Hurley aimed at the Pentagon budgeteers who withhold money for a program that has been approved by the Joint Chiefs and authorized by Congress: "You should shoot them, or drown them or put 'em in jail." Summed...
...Force has a "backup," or reserve ICBM, the Martin Titan, currently running twelve to 14 months behind Atlas. Titan is a two-stage, liquid-fuel missile with an Atlas-type nose cone and an Atlas-sized engine thrust that can power a hydrogen warhead more than 5,500 miles. Another advantage: Titan can be broken down into two parts for easier ground or air-cargo transportation. Titan has undergone static tests of its component parts, has not yet been tested as a complete weapons system, is not expected to reach test-flight status until fall...
...growth of the corporation's civilian lines. Vital defense projects are bound to grow rather than shrink in the next few years. Convair and RCA have already submitted to the Defense Department plans for an anti-missile missile, the Wizard II, which could search out an incoming enemy ICBM and explode it high in the atmosphere. The Wizard could conceivably be put into production by 1965 (at a cost of up to $5 billion) if the Defense Department gives an immediate go-ahead for a crash program...