Word: irbms
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...good 1,600 miles southeastward from Florida last week, watchers aboard the Navy's salvage ship Escape spotted a white object as it hurtled out of the sky and plunged into the Atlantic. It was the nose cone of a Jupiter IRBM, launched only minutes earlier from a pad at the Cape Canaveral missile test center. Hoisted aboard Escape, the recovered cone proved that the Army had solved both the reentry problem and the accuracy problem. Hitting the target area at a range of 1,600 miles was a feat of marksmanship considerably more remarkable than nicking a dime...
...heat. It is used in 20 types of missiles, sometimes in the nose cones, sometimes in other hot spots such as the nozzles of rocket motors. The Thompson company says that a laminated layer of Astro-lite two-tenths of an inch thick can protect the nose of an IRBM. For an ICBM, which enters the atmosphere much faster, four inches may be needed. This thickness weighs, says Thompson, only one-fifteenth as much as a heat-resistant metal used for the same...
...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 such close-in bases as those in Europe and Formosa. But the big new dividend of solid fuel is that Minuteman missiles can be fired from Soft, deep, concrete-lined and steel-capped underground cylindrical chambers -"inverted silos...
Instant Thrust. The Navy first hit full speed with the Polaris system early last year, after it ditched the idea of adapting the Army's bulky liquid-fuel Jupiter for shipboard use. As Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Arleigh Burke said, the Navy needed "an IRBM with salt water in its veins." Burke picked peppery, redheaded Rear Admiral William Francis Raborn Jr., 52, to run the Polaris program, tossed Raborn a bankroll of $37 million for a start. "Red" Raborn, who moves so fast that he will only drink instant coffee (and sometimes a Scotch-and-water), rounded...
...sites (where liquid-fuel rockets require considerable time getting up steam) will be, too. Polaris subs, on the other hand, are moving platforms that would defy pinpointing. Moreover, with U.S.-manned Polaris subs operating in foreign waters, the nation would not need to haggle with NATO countries over placing IRBM launching sites on their soil. And finally, say the Navymen, since Polaris-plus-submarine equals an intercontinental missile, the U.S. coiild stop work on ICBMs and their-bases altogether...