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The speed of missile progress—and obsolescence, the seamy side of progress—shows plainly in President Eisenhower's defense budget for fiscal 1960, beginning next July. Predictably, procurement of the Air Force's subsonic, air-breathing Snark is being terminated. Less predictably, the new budget provides very little new money for the top intermediate-range ballistic missiles, the Air Force's Thor and the Army's Jupiter. Procurement of both will halt before the end of 1960 (see diagram) unless the U.S.'s NATO allies show a lot more interest in getting U.S. IRBMs than they have shown so far. Recent U.S. military thinking has downgraded the IRBM's importance; it is too powerful to be useful in a limited war, and in an all-out war the overseas launching sites would be vulnerable to Soviet missile attack. Under present plans, Jupiter will be limited to a mere three squadrons of about 15 missiles each, Thor to five squadrons. The long-delayed decision between Thor and Jupiter will never be reached; technological change, outrunning the glacial pace of bureaucracy, has made the issue moot.
The U.S.'s only intercontinental ballistic missile close to operational status is the Air Force's liquid-fuel Atlas, which has been fired over its full 6,000-mile range, and even sent into orbit around the earth. About a year and a half behind Atlas in development is the Air Force's Titan ICBM, also liquid-fueled but more advanced in design and capable of carrying a bigger payload. Present schedules call for deployment over the next few years of eleven Titan squadrons with about ten missiles each, plus nine Atlas squadrons. These will account for the U.S.'s big ICBM punch in the early 1960s.
Faith in Solids. But even before the first Atlas or Titan is ready for firing in anger, obsolescence is stalking both birds. For the nation's main missile force in the mid-1960s and beyond. Administration defense planners are betting on two solid-fuel missiles: the Navy's Polaris and the Air Force's Minuteman. Both will lurk in comparatively invulnerable nests: Polaris in nuclear submarines beneath offshore seas, and Minuteman in underground concrete silos. Though it has not yet been fired with full success, Polaris is scheduled for operational deployment beginning next year. Already it has doomed the Navy's air-breathing Regulus II. Minuteman, still in mid-development, is supposed to be ready for deployment in mid-1962, go into mass production in 1963-64.
With both Polaris and Minuteman in full production in the mid-1960s, the U.S., as Administration planners reckon, will be able to close the missile gap rapidly and decisively—in fact, a force of Minutemen could well leave the Soviets with a technological gap. The big policy question is whether, during the years between, the U.S. should try to forestall any temporary missile gap by pushing production of Atlas and Titan.