Word: liquid-fuel
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ELEVEN months ago, in a cover story on the Air Force's missile boss. Major General Bernard Schriever, TIME told the story of the U.S.'s first liquid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missile, the Atlas. So fast has been the pace of missile development that Schriever and the Air Force are already hard at work on a new missile system that may ultimately make Atlas look like a Zeppelin. See NATIONAL AFFAIRS, The Second Generation...
Minuteman is the latest major weapons system to grow from the big breakthrough in the development of solid-fueled missiles. Almost as soon as scientists found solutions to solid-fuel problems, the relatively inexpensive, highly mobile, easily handled solid-fuel missiles opened up whole new prospects of operation. And at the same time they doomed to swift obsolescence the cumbersome, complex, costly, "first-generation" liquid-fuel missiles, with their big, liquid-oxygen plants, their long fueling time before launching and their intricate plumbing...
...Force had long been concerned about the mounting costs and complexities of the U.S.'s liquid-fueled missiles-the ICBMs Atlas and Titan, the IRBMs Thor and Jupiter-and had also been aware that long-countdown liquid-fuel missiles were not weapons of true instant retaliation. Barred by the Defense Department temporarily from solid-fuel development, the Air Force was impressed by the rapid progress and strategic potential of the Navy's solid-fuel Polaris. Months ago Schriever's men got down to work adapting the Polaris' developments to Air Force concepts...
...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...
...bases, they argue, are already prime Russian targets, and SAC missile-launching 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...