Word: nike
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...reinforced the Seventh Fleet, already the greatest concentration of fire power ever in the Western Pacific, stripped down the Formosa defense command for action, added supersonic Lockheed F-1048 and the Army's Nike Hercules antiaircraft missiles to Formosa's arsenal, then sent Pacific Commander in Chief Admiral Harry Felt to Formosa for conferences and inspection...
...four sites around Taipei, engineers of the U.S.'s Vinnell Co. rushed construction of launching sites for Nike-Hercules ground-to-air missiles. Vinnell, which normally takes a year to build a Nike site in the U.S., has undertaken a crash program to finish the sites in 50 days, though it still had no formal contract nor any blueprints. Banking on Vinnell's know-how, the Army last week flew in an advance party of a missile battalion from Texas...
...thing that made it grow in the first place: new ideas, plus topflight research into new fields. Gradually extending its contract to 87% ownership, General Tire gave Kimball the funds he needed to push Aerojet into liquid engines for some of the first U.S. military rockets: Douglas' early Nike, the Lark and Loon for the Navy. Aerojet branched out to work on underwater rocket engines, set up separate departments to pursue both liquid-and solid-fuel engines...
Before the 526th AAA Missile Battalion installed batteries of Nike-Ajax missiles in northern New Jersey three years ago, the Army carefully explained that the 21-ft. TNT and shrapnel projectiles were virtually accident-proof. A missile battery, said the Army, was no more dangerous a neighbor than a gas station. Last week the gas-station blew up. Installing a trigger modification on one of the 526th B Battery Nikes near Leonardo, N.J., ordnance technicians accidentally detonated the missile. Explosion and flame touched off seven more Nikes squatting on adjacent pads, blew or burned ten men to death, showered...
Next day the Army hurried in ordnance experts in an attempt to establish the cause of the explosion, halted further modification of the Nikes. Army lawyers began to settle claims for shattered windows and broken bric-a-brac. Meanwhile, the Army had little to say about a development yet to come: along with two dozen other missile installations ringing New York City, B Battery is scheduled to replace its TNT Nike-Ajaxes after this year with the atomic Nike-Hercules. In the wake of Leonardo's explosive afternoon, it was going to be hard to convince the neighbors...