Word: titanically
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Defense Secretary Neil McElroy's estimate, will be outgunned 3 to 1 by the Communists in intercontinental ballistic missiles. The new proposal: double the U.S.'s planned production of ICBMs by mid-1963. Planning now calls for the deployment of 90 Atlas ICBMs and 110 Titan ICBMs in 20 squadrons of ten missiles apiece by mid-1963. The U.S., under the new proposal, would add 200 more Atlas ICBMs to the buildup. Cost over four years: about $2.5 billion, with a relatively small $500 million to come out of the fiscal 1960 budget as a first installment...
...Senate Preparedness Subcommittee (TIME, Feb. 9). The Administration's thesis: 1) the U.S. will get through the missile gap of the early 1960s with a "diversified" deterrent of manned thermonuclear bombers, Navy carriers and missile-firing nuclear submarines, plus a slowly growing, minimum force of Atlas and Titan ICBMs and the medium-range ballistic missile Thor; 2) the U.S. will close the gap around 1964 to the U.S.S.R.'s disadvantage when the Air Force deploys its "second-generation" solid-fuel Minuteman ICBM in hundreds of underground silos as the missile age's first true mass weapon...
...Force's Titan intercontinental ballistic missile, black-and-white-striped and tall as a ten-story building, boomed off the launching pad at Cape Canaveral last week, roared up 50 miles or so through a long-awaited break in the grey overcast, plopped its no tons into the warm Atlantic 300 miles downrange (maximum hoped-for range: 9,000 miles). The U.S.'s first successful firing of a second-generation ICBM (after Atlas) brought cheers from airmen and Titan's Martin Co. crew, weary from a two-month fight against the gremlins that unaccountably popped its umbilical...
...Though Titan's second stage in this shoot was only a water-ballasted dummy, the first stage's performance (300,000-lb. thrust, U.S.'s biggest) promised that the hard-base missile (TIME, Oct. 13) would be ready for defense operation next year. The bird's now-certain role: temporary plug in the missile gap between the deterrent power of the Strategic Air Command's manned bombers and the oncoming solid-fuel Navy Polaris and Air Force Minuteman...
...late nor too soon. Looking ahead to the mid-1960s, when Minuteman and Polaris will account for most of the U.S.'s deterrent-retaliatory power, Administration planners are convinced that it would be wildly wasteful to build in the meantime a huge force of obsolescence-doomed Atlases and Titans to replace SAC bombers. So the Administration is partially leapfrogging the Atlas-Titan generation. During the early 1960s the U.S. will continue to rely for much of its retaliatory power on SAC's manned bombers. Meanwhile, SAC will be kept updated, with B-58s and B-70s gradually replacing...