Word: minuteman
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...into the Little Belt Mountains. There, above the once prosperous coal-mining town of Belt (pop. 757), a plain link fence encloses two acres of barren land and Russian thistle, four watchful electronic sentinels, and a few drab slabs of concrete. Beneath that concrete is buried an Air Force Minuteman missile-one of the most efficient instruments of intercontinental destruction the U.S. possesses...
...Belt site is just one of many Minuteman installations either built or abuilding. Officially declared operational for the first time this week, 20 of the three-stage, 32-ton Minutemen are now cradled in 80-ft. silos sunk in Montana's wheat and cattle country. They are armed with nuclear warheads, aimed and ready to hurl the equivalent of 500,000 tons...
Fast & Simple. Minuteman is the weapons system that, with the Navy's Polaris submarines, is making the so-called "missile gap" a real missile gap-favoring the West. Within a year, Montana will have 150 Minutemen in place. Another 650 have been authorized for South Dakota, North Dakota, Missouri and Wyoming. Minutemen will roll like cigars off production lines until some 1,500 are deployed, far outnumbering the U.S.'s programmed 126 Atlas missiles and 108 Titans...
...advantage of Minuteman is that its three engines use solid fuel. Thus, while the already deployed, liquid-fueled Atlas and Titan* take 15 minutes to fire, Minuteman can blast out of its hole within 32 seconds of the trigger command -the first truly pushbutton transoceanic weapon. The use of a solid propellant also eliminates the complex plumbing and finicky maintenance problems of the earlier missiles. Minutemen can be turned out faster than their silos can be emplaced. Once deployed, they require no major maintenance for three years. At a systems cost of $3,400,000 per missile, Minuteman costs...
...Minuteman has arrived a year ahead of its original schedule, speeded by Air Force decisions in 1959, when there were widespread charges that an unfavorable missile gap did indeed exist. Although the speedup seemed "absolutely impossible" to Air Force brass, it was accomplished mainly by the drive, patience, and, as one colleague puts it, the "damn genius" of Brigadier General Sam Phillips, Minuteman program director and, at 41, one of the youngest generals in the Air Force...