Word: titan
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Confidence surged last week through the U.S. missile program, which suddenly had a new hero: the Titan II, a radically new missile that moves the U.S. a giant step forward in space and nuclear effectiveness. Resigned to a series of test failures before they get a success, U.S. missilemen were jubilant when the giant Titan II climbed off its pad at Cape Canaveral on the very first try, lit its second stage exactly on schedule and flew a flawless course to the target 5,000 miles away. No big liquid-fuel rocket has ever scored such an immediate triumph...
...Titan II is far more than just an improved model of the much criticized Titan I. During the development of Titan I, Aerojet-General, which built Titan II's engines; stored up dozens of new ideas for an advanced missile; instead of dribbling them into the Titan I, it saved them for a brand-new missile. Titan II is considerably bigger (102 ft. high) than Titan I or Atlas, has greater thrust (430,000 Ibs. v. the Atlas' 360,000 Ibs.) and has far fewer gadgets that can go wrong. Says Aerojet-General's A. L. Feldman...
...when the Air Force would just be getting its RS-70s into operation, the U.S. will be protected by over 1,000 Atlas, Titan and Minuteman missiles, plus 650 Polaris missiles carried by submarines and more than 700 B-52s and B-58s. Without a single RS-70, said McNamara, U.S. retaliatory forces "would achieve practically complete destruction of the enemy target system-even after absorbing an initial nuclear attack...
...weapons" and makes U.S. radar detection systems useless, since the rockets "can fly around the world in any direction and strike a blow at any set target." This was hardly news, and the U.S. could make the same claim, as proved by the 5,000-mile flight of a Titan II rocket on the very same day Khrushchev spoke. In Washington, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara replied that U.S. nuclear striking power is so great that the nation could take a surprise attack, then destroy Russia and still have enough left over to counter a threat from any third...
...that were struggling under inefficient management-and rarely overhauled them sufficiently to make them effective. The insistence that, above all, Yuba must show continual sales gains drove division managers to enter into many contracts that later turned out to be profitless; one division lost $3,300,000 on two Titan II missile-site construction jobs. No less disastrous was the practice of pushing divisions into businesses that they did not understand. The Nichols-Southern division, which had been clearing as much as $250,000 a year renting equipment to the chemical and petroleum industries, stumbled into a loss...