Word: pentagonals
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...choices between concepts and weapons. Defense Secretary Neil McElroy, backed up by the President, has tried to hold the 1960 defense budget to a distinctly uncomfortable $41.6 billion, i.e., this year's level plus a 2% inflation factor. And one result of the painful ceiling is that the Pentagon is taking hard-eyed looks at duplication and obsolescence among the U.S.'s twoscore missile programs...
Downgrading the IRBM. With NATO allies except Britain and Italy showing scant enthusiasm for U.S.-offered intermediate-range missiles, the Pentagon is reappraising the worth of the IRBM, designed for launching from overseas sites, as against the intercontinental missile, designed for launching from U.S. bases. Trend: more reliance on ICBMs, less on IRBMs, which would be of little use in a limited war and would be vulnerable to Russian attacks on overseas bases...
Last week Defense Secretary McElroy led a Pentagon task force to the President's golf retreat at Augusta to report on the possibilities of wringing water out of the defense budget. After the meeting McElroy told newsmen that it will be "pretty rough'' to keep 1960 spending at the fiscal-1959 level. But when asked whether 1960's total would be $2 billion higher than 1959's, he recoiled: "Oh, no." How about $1 billion higher? "I just don't know," said McElroy. His final word before boarding his plane back to Washington: "economy...
...bogdown of the U.S.-U.K.-U.S.S.R. disarmament talks at Geneva, the U.S.'s smoldering debate about stopping nuclear tests-more or less tamped down by the President's decision last August to stop tests for one year-fanned into new flame. The Atomic Energy Commission and the Pentagon, convinced that prolonged test suspension would play fast and loose with U.S. military posture, argued for resuming low-fallout tests. And last week the advocates of full test suspension, centered in President Eisenhower's Science Advisory Committee under M.I.T.'s James Rhyne Killian, loosed a bitter counterattack...
...Government economist predicted that defense orders will taper off after their recent spurt. Viewing the expected softening in housing and Pentagon procurement, he said: "We may be entering a period of somewhat more sober views of our economy, maybe a feeling of some disappointment. This will not be because our economy is declining. It will be, if it develops, because our economy is not expanding as rapidly as some of this recent exhilaration has suggested it would do. The fault will not lie with our economy but with our views...