Word: irbms
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Navy's lagging Vanguard. He figured that the IRBM rivalry between the Air Force Thor and the Army Jupiter had gone so far, taken so long and cost so much that both should be put into production. McElroy upgraded Deputy Assistant Secretary William Holaday to the post of missile boss. To those who doubted Holaday's ability, McElroy also let it be known that the Pentagon's real missile boss was Neil McElroy...
...growing family of liquid oxygen ("lox") -and-kerosene-fueled missiles is that they cannot retaliate instantly. Time needed to fuel the Air Force's test-ICBM Atlas: a minimum 15 minutes after an hour-long countdown. Time needed to fuel the Air Force's test IRBM Thor, even using a promising but not fully tested method of "force-feeding": eight minutes. The U.S.'s lox missiles could conceivably be knocked out by the enemy before they could be fueled and primed for launching...
...missile like a futuristic firework, Jupiter swept into the sky in a first-class launching. But, said the Defense Department, it "failed to complete its full flight because of technical difficulties." Thor, on the other hand, was eminently successful. For the first time, the Air Force fired its IRBM complete: nose cone, full guidance gear-and ballast in the nose to simulate the weight of its warhead. Thor flew a little under 1,200 nautical miles, landed within less than two nautical miles of its preselected target point. Thus Thor proved to be the leading IRBM in the U.S. arsenal...
Since 1946, missile spending has skyrocketed from $70 million to $3 billion annually. But in actual fact, the U.S. intermediate (IRBM) and intercontinental (ICBM) missile programs are still in the experimental stages. Intermediate missiles alone may cost the U.S. $7 billion; the bigger, 5,000-mile Atlas ICBM will cost $8 billion to $10 billion in the next decade or so before it is superseded by something better. And missile programs themselves will get bigger and more expensive...
West Germany's Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, fearful of domestic repercussions, hoped to avoid any immediate consideration of missile bases on German soil, and told Dulles so. French Foreign Minister Christian Pineau proposed an implied bargain: France would grant IRBM bases if the U.S. would back France in Algeria and support French ambitions to join Britain and the U.S. as NATO's third nuclear power. In Rome the semiofficial news agency Italia reported that "the Italian government does not consider granting of missile bases to NATO a necessary consequence of the international responsibilities Italy has already assumed...