Word: skybolt
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Skybolt was. indeed, dead. Last week the Pentagon formally canceled production contracts for the 1,000-mile missile, which Great Britain had planned to adapt to its Vulcan II bombers, and the U.S. Air Force had counted on to prolong the life of its B-52s. Said Deputy Defense Secretary Roswell Gilpatric: "The test did not conclusively demonstrate the capacity of the missile to achieve the target accuracy for which the Skybolt system was designed...
...what seemed like a final, fiery protest against the death sentence pronounced on it by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, a 40-ft. Skybolt missile flashed away from its B-52 bomber and down the Atlantic Missile Range in a flight computed to be 991 miles long.* Jubilant Air Force officers pronounced the test "a success." But at the Pentagon, Skybolt's critics dourly contended that the missile was 100 miles off target, said the test would not save Skybolt. Declared one: "It was just rigor mortis setting...
...talks, said U.S. spokesmen, would cover a wide range of topics-NATO, the Common Market, Russia, the Chinese invasion of India, and especially the Congo. This ploy grated on the British. Cried an indignant British newsman: "They couldn't care less about Skybolt! All they want to talk about is the Congo!" But what they did, in fact, was talk about Skybolt...
...Nations? For all the uproar over Skybolt, the man in the pub was more worried about job security than the tenuous protection that nuclear weapons might buy. The Briton who had never had it so good in 1959 is bitterly aware today that the island is again in danger of being splintered into "two nations": the prosperous south and the chronically blighted north, where shipbuilding, mining and other ailing 19th century industries are concentrated. Britain's admission to the Common Market may in the long run ease its economic woes. But Macmillan's critics blame Britain...
...result, Macmillan has deepened France's ancient mistrust of perfidious Albion, while the Kennedy Administration's consultations with Whitehall have become ever more perfunctory on such life-or-death issues as Berlin and Cuba. The Administration's abrupt announcement that it planned to scuttle Skybolt left Britons shocked and disillusioned by what seemed to be a brutal rejection of their nation's claim to equal partnership with the U.S. The U.S., rued the Tory Spectator, kicked Britain "down the nuclear league to end up tying with, perhaps, Italy...