Word: skybolt
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Macmillan cherished any idea that Kennedy would relent on Skybolt. that hope was foredoomed. Kennedy had been convinced by U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara that Skybolt was not worth the money or effort. The U.S. team at Nassau therefore tried to downplay Skybolt's significance to the conference...
...specific dispute between Kennedy and Macmillan was the all-but-final U.S. decision to scrap the Skybolt missile project (TIME, Dec. 21). The U.S. had promised to supply Britain with at least 100 Skybolts, and the British, with no long-range missile capability of their own, had built many of their defense plans around the bomber-launched weapon...
...recent Cuba crisis without even going through the motions of consulting Macmillan in advance; this brought home to Britons the painful fact that the U.S. no longer treats Britain in keeping with that "special relationship" brought to such heights by Winston Churchill. The sparks of anger over Skybolt therefore fell upon tinder of shredded pride and splintered pretensions. In the House of Commons, a Tory member thundered that "the British people are tired of being pushed around." U.S.-British relations, rumbled the Paris financial daily, Information, "are today in a state of complete crisis." Cried the Daily Herald, summing...
...President Kennedy has backed McNamara. At his news conference, Kennedy placed the cost of the Skybolt system at $2.5 billion, a figure that Skybolt contractors feel is much too high. Kennedy also seemed to express doubt that Skybolt will ever work at all. Said he in a strangely defeatist statement: ''It has been really, in a sense, the kind of engineering that's been beyond...
...seeking to soothe the British, the U.S. made it clear that Britain is free to go ahead with Skybolt-at its own expense. But this would require an increase of about 30% in Britain's income tax-a prospect hardly palatable to any government, much less Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's hard-pressed Tories. The U.S. will also offer to help Britain adapt its nuclear submarines to carry Polaris missiles; this would be better, but still not enough to satisfy the British. And Macmillan will certainly express that dissatisfaction in his Nassau meeting with Kennedy this week...