Word: vandenbergers
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...quietest and perhaps most meaningful news was that the Air Force was getting ready this week to fire an intermediate range Thor from a brand-new base perched on a jagged coastal saucer 168 miles northwest of Los Angeles-Strategic Air Command's Vandenberg Air Force Base. The West Coast missile complex is designed to take up where Cape Canaveral leaves off; i.e., primarily to shoot operational missiles and train crews to handle them. One Western advantage : satellites can be flung thence into polar orbits (see diagram) without hazard to populated areas...
Hard by a strip of wild, windblown Pacific shore near Lompoc, Calif., construction workers at Vandenberg Air Force Base last week were digging a 15-story hole in the ground. Within weeks, the deep cylindrical pit will be paved with concrete so thick that months must pass before it cures. Then the U.S. Air Force will slide a 90-ft., 117-ton monster into its perpendicular den and seal it with heavy concrete doors against the megaton shocks of man-made thermonuclear quakes. The monster is the Titan intercontinental ballistic missile, the first weapon in Air Force history...
...such, Titan presages the day when all long-range missiles will lurk beneath the earth, invisible and well-nigh invulnerable to enemy attack. The sunken silo at Vandenberg is only one part of a subterranean complex under construction as Titan's first "hard base." Adjoining the missile tank are other sunken cylinders (see diagram), housing air-conditioning and hydraulic equipment, a power station, liquid oxygen and fuel tanks, and a command control center for the launch crew. Tunnels connect the widely dispersed elements, but after the alert, only the control center will be occupied. Remotely controlled, the monster, fueled...
...German interests. ¶ While Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs (1944-45), fought for a clause in the United Nations Charter far more vital than he knew; thinking primarily of Latin American relations, he enlisted the aid of Michigan's late, great Senator Arthur Vandenberg, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, in providing for the right of U.N. members to make regional security pacts, thereby laid the groundwork for such postwar defense alliances as NATO, SEATO and the Baghdad Pact...
...Suite 4E924 of the Pentagon, where he is soon stirring up memorandums and directives-green for LeMay, pink for able Air Force Secretary James Douglas, white for his staff. Around him hangs the sense of illustrious predecessors: husky, flamboyant "Hap" Arnold; sinewy, battle-tried "Tooey" Spaatz; slim Hoyt Vandenberg, the old flyer with a 50-mission crush in his cap; Nate Twining, the wise old pilot who led the USAF from props to jets. There Tommy White does his broad-gauge best with what he has. But nobody in the Pentagon knows better than he that he has his problems...