Word: sacs
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When the down-with-SAC outcry got back to Washington, the official spokesmen chorused cold denials. Said Presidential Press Secretary James Hagerty: "Mr. Gromyko's statements are not true." Said the State Department in a formal statement: "It is categorically denied that the U.S. Air Force is conducting provocative nights." Said the spokesman for the U.S. delegation to the U.N.: "We have always been willing to discuss any charges made against us. Witness the fantastic accusations directed at us-potato bugs, germ warfare and others-all proved to be absurd and untrue...
...these matters." From British Labor Party Leader Hugh Gaitskell-"Stop the nuclear tests and start the talks"-to Canada's Tory Prime Minister John Diefenbaker-"My hope is that the free world will discontinue the tests"-many maturer folk were flipflopping too. But Gromyko's charge against SAC was too wild for credibility...
...mile perimeter, the U.S. Air Force's Strategic Air Command, a 2,000-bomber force capable in a single sortie of hitting the U.S.S.R. with 2,000 times the total explosive power of World War II, took K.'s rocket-rattling with professional seriousness. SAC began to cut down the "reaction time" of its strike force-hundreds of bombers-from two hours to 15 minutes. This was the Air Force's best estimate of the warning SAC bases would get before an enemy missile strike (TIME, Nov. 25). If an "instant readiness" deterrent force...
...perhaps the most remarkable aspect of SAC's reply to Khrushchev is that SAC has also fashioned a safety catch for its hair trigger, a crucial check upon the deterrent power, so as to rule out the minuscule but horrifying chance that World War III might explode out of one aircrew's accident or aberration or miscalculation. Name of SAC's safety catch: Fail Safe...
...minimal or no harm. Fail Safe on U.S. railroads, for example, means "the dead man's throttle." If an engineer dies at the controls, his pressure on a foot pedal or hand lever is released, and the train automatically goes into an emergency stop. Fail Safe at SAC means that SAC bomber crews, launched in an alert, do not proceed toward their preassigned target beyond a preassigned coordinate point without a coded follow-up command. Only beyond the Fail Safe point are SAC crews permitted even to arm their nuclear weapons...