Word: vandenbergers
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TODAY there is no missile gap because neither the U.S. nor the U.S.S.R. (so far as the U.S. knows) has any significant intercontinental ballistic missile capability. The U.S. has only three operational ICBMs-three Atlases on launching pads at California's Vandenberg A.F.B. The U.S.S.R. has more-ten, says one Washington guesstimate-but not enough to add up to a meaningful weight on the scales of power. By mid-1961, the U.S.'s total will be up to approximately 72 (four Atlas squadrons with ten missiles apiece, two Polaris subs, each carrying 16 missiles), and the U.S.S.R...
...presidential-preference laws that survive today in 15 states and the District of Columbia, Wisconsin's primary also became the country's biggest burying ground for the hopes of hopefuls. By favoring New York's Thomas Dewey, G.O.P. primary voters put Michigan's Senator Arthur Vandenberg out of the nomination race in 1940, ended Hoosier Wendell Willkie's bid for a second nomination in 1944; their votes for Minnesota's Harold Stassen stopped the 1948 campaign to nominate General Douglas MacArthur; the vote for California's Earl Warren (locally viewed as Dwight Eisenhower...
From a launching pad at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base last week, a 78-ft., two-stage Discoverer rocket soared skyward into a fine north-south polar orbit. The following afternoon, on its 17th orbit, if things went according to plan, a remote-control signal would eject the 310-lb. payload from Discoverer VIII's orbiting second-stage rocket, and the capsule would fall earthward, slowed by a 30-ft.-wide parachute...
...with the SAC insignia, lay in reserve, their H-bomb war heads stored near by, ready for installation in brief minutes. After five test flops followed by four successes in a row at Cape Canaveral, the U.S.'s prime weapon of deterrence seemed ready at last to serve Vandenberg's twin functions as an operational base for the launching of ICBMs against an enemy and a training center for the men who will fire them...
Within months, Vandenberg will add new sets of pads to handle the increasing supply of production-line missiles. Vandenberg-trained SACmen will eventually form nine SAC Atlas squadrons, stationed at seven ICBM bases now under construction in Wyoming, Kansas, Nebraska and Washington. Meanwhile, the men in helmets-green for safety, white for command, orange for fuel and brown for the contractors' personnel-are ready to fire their first Atlases from the pads of Complex...