Word: icbms
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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...
...Technology of a new-type guidance gyro that can be kept running continuously inside the underground slots for as long as two to three years; 3) successful testing by Thiokol Chemical Corp. of the biggest solid-fuel rocket engine ever built, with more than enough thrust to meet ICBM requirements...
...thing was made clear in the Minuteman announcement: the Air Force knows that the days are numbered for its vast, multibillion-dollar liquid-fuel ICBM program, which is in its test stages. What will be done with these missiles when, in the mid-1960s, they are obsolete...
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...