Word: missions
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Choice of Mission...
...whipped up by an anonymous telephone call four days later to one of William Fulbright's Foreign Relations Committee staffers. The caller urged the committee to investigate the reason why Columbia University Physicist Richard Garwin and several other nuclear-weapons experts had been sent recently on a secret mission to Viet Nam. Hence Fulbright's letter to Rusk-who brusquely denied that the Garwin mission had anything to do with nuclear weapons...
...Soviet Union is adding to its fleet of 55 nuclear-powered submarines at the rate of five a year. Most of the Soviet nukes are hunter-killers whose mission is to destroy U.S. Polaris subs in time of war, but a growing number fire a new underwater missile that has a range of at least 1,500 miles (v. the U.S. missile's range of 2,500 miles). Since he believes that naval guns are obsolete, Admiral Gorshkov has equipped almost all Soviet surface ships, from the smallest to the largest, with ship-to-ship missiles. The Soviet missiles...
...subs, but Lenin's successor, Stalin, was dissatisfied with such an invisible fleet. In the mid-1930s, he reinstated the navy as an independent service and started building a huge surface fleet. The Germans captured the partly finished hulks when they swept into Russia in 1941. Thus the mission of defending the Red Army's coastal flanks fell to the Soviet navy's ragtag fleet. Most seagoing men would have chafed at such a coastline assignment, but a young captain named Sergei Gorshkov welcomed it as an opportunity...
...Atlantic and Mediterranean fleets keep similar grids on the location of Red warships. As a precautionary measure, U.S. carriers keep a so-called Air Cap of three or four fighters in the air at all times whenever they sail within range of Soviet navy bombers. The Air Cap mission is to intercept the Soviets at least 200 miles out and to "escort" the Russians as they fly over the U.S. task force...