Word: icbms
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...their Christmas window-shopping early. Detroit rolled its 1958 models and began to croon its annual siren sales song to the U.S. public. Out came a whole fleet of new cars in a blizzard of announcements promising "jet intakes," "bubble windshields," "flight-pitch transmissions," "Marauder engines"-even an ICBM look. There were downswept snouts, upswept fins and outswept taillights ; all were ablaze with dazzling colors and gleaming chrome brighter than any Christmas tree. Sighed a Detroit secretary, rapturously examining a trailerload of new 1958s; "Chrome is my favorite color...
...only the distance from Bonn to Vienna," growled West Germany's Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. "It does not prove they can fire anything parallel to the earth over a distance of many thousand miles." And even if Sputnik did imply Russian possession of an early version of an ICBM, the balance of atomic superiority still lay with the U.S. "The threat of devastation still hangs heavy over the Soviet head, derived from the ring of bomber bases. We know nothing to suggest that Sputnik or anything like it can stop such potential destruction," said a British foreign-policymaker...
...General Lauris Norstad once called "absolute" destruction on Russia. This capacity-the ability to smash Russia from close up and hence to destroy her more thoroughly than she could hope to destroy the U.S.-has been the ultimate deterrent to Russian military adventures. If the day of an ICBM standoff and of equal capacity for destruction is now dawning, new force will be given to Stalin's dictum to Roosevelt at Yalta: "Neither of us wants war, but our strength is that you fear it more." Protected-at least in their own mind-by the umbrella of U.S. fear...
That Left-Out Feeling. Even if the Russians should resist this temptation, the prospect of a U.S.-Soviet ICBM standoff gave Europeans a nervous, left-out feeling. "The two big boys," said an official of West Germany's Defense Ministry, "must in the very nature of the situation lift their eyes and look straight across at one another, not noticing the in-betweens like ourselves so much. The arrival of long-range rockets implies the devaluation of American bases abroad and hence the downgrading of places like Germany. As a concomitant, one must assume less interest in such suddenly...
Symington told a news conference that while Russia does not now have an operational intercontinental ballistics missile ICBM, it would have one within two or three years capable of attacking any part of the United States...