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Planning translates itself into hardware. This week the first B-52E, an improved version of the B-52, will go to work for SAC; soon will come the B-526, designed to give the alert force 30% more range. The Air Force has contracted for 30 test supersonic delta-wing B58 bombers for phasing in beside the medium B-473. Already SAC has its first operational intercontinental guided missile: Snark, a lumbering air-breather that cannot break the sound barrier but can dump a thermonuclear payload (as it proved in a flight test last week) on a target less than five miles in diameter at a range of 5,000 miles. A really hot Air Force prospect is Rascal, an air-to-ground missile for firing from B-47s that can hit a target at supersonic speed and 100-mile range. One of Tommy White's biggest decisions to come: whether to develop another round of bombers to replace the B-58, or to wait for operational ballistic missiles.
This week, even as the Air Force intercontinental ballistic missile Atlas awaits its third flight test at Cape Canaveral, Fla., a $40 million industry to make Atlas is already in pilot production; the SAC teams that will fire Atlas are already in training at Air Force Missileman Major General Ben A. Schriever's headquarters in California. The Atlas' first field unit was recently activated as the ist ballistic Missile Division, U.S.A.F. The argument between the bomber generals and the missile generals has been overrated. Says Bomber General LeMay: '.'We're not wedded to the bomber in this organization. We're wedded to getting the job done. The better the tool, the better we like it." Says Missile General Ben Schriever: "The operational force will be trained. The force will be ready."
Force for Space. Beyond that, Tommy White must ever look ahead with hard-headed realism to the day when the U.S.'s force-to-be must move operationally into space. "The Air Force," he says, "has been pioneering for many years to project man into space. We airmen see and are exploring an extension of the possibilities and potential." The Air Force needs to get into space, not as an area for headlines but as a vantage point to study such hardheaded items as meteorology, geodesy, radio communications. The Air Force must know how radar waves act in space, how nuclear warheads will explode in space to prepare for future battles in space, i.e., to knock down the enemy's missiles. Also, the Air Force is working beyond ballistic missiles to develop glide missiles—weapons that follow a ballistic trajectory through space, break back into the atmosphere under control, dodge antimissile missiles and put an H-bomb on the target. Then, perhaps, there will be the fantastic reality of manned missiles.