Just a starter...
Chock Full of Information...607 pages!!!! See
Chapter 8, page 7: Missile Deployment, below.
To DEFEND AND DETER:
THE LEGACY OF
THE UNITED STATES COLD
WAR MISSILE PROGRAM
JOHN C. LONNQUEST AND DAVID F. WINKLER
USACERL Special Report 97/01
November 1996
A study sponsored by the Department of Defense
Legacy Resource Management Program
Cold War Project
CHAPTER 8
ICBM DEPLOYMENT
After developing the
Atlas, Titan, and Minuteman ICBMs, the Air Force’s next task
was determining how many
to buy, where to deploy them, and what type of launch facilities
to build. These decisions
had to be made quickly, because building the missiles and
their launch and support
facilities would take several years. However, these decisions
also had to be made
judiciously because the Air Force realized that the decisions it made
in the late 1950s and
early 1960s would determine the size and shape of the nation’s
ICBM force for decades to
come.
The size of the nation’s
ICBM force expanded considerably during the late 1950s and
early 1960s. In late 1955
the Air Force hoped to have a force of 120 Atlas missiles in
place by 1960, and in
late 1956 President Eisenhower thought “that 150 well-targeted
missiles might be enough”
to deter a Soviet first strike.l
By early 1958, however,
the threat of the Soviet missile program, crystallized in the
furor over Sputnik and
the debate over the missile gap, prompted the United States to
deploy more ICBMs. In
1957 the influential Gaither Report recommended a force of 600
ICBMS, and by 1958 the
Air Force proposed deploying 1,600 Minuteman missiles.2 The
commander of SAC, General
Curtis LeMay, wanted even more; at one point he proposed
that his command deploy
10,000 of the solid-fuel missiles. As it turned out the
Minuteman proved to be so
effective that a force of that size was unnecessary. In the
early 1960s Secretary of
Defense Robert McNamara fixed the nation’s land-based ICBM
force at 1,000 Minuteman
missiles plus the 54 Titan 11s then under construction. The
force remained that size
for the next 25 years.
Site Selection
The Air Force determined where to locate the missile
launch facilities based on missile
range and the distance to the target.3 For example,
the Air Force originally decided
to deploy the first operational Minuteman squadron at
Vandenberg AFB, on the
California coast northwest of Los Angeles. Shortly
thereafter the Air Force discovered a
flaw in the first stage of the Minuteman IA, the
first production model, that reduced its
range from 6,300 to 4,300 miles. The defective
nozzles promised to be a major setback
because, for the missiles based at Vandenberg, a
range of 4,300 miles was insufficient to
carry them over the North Pole and strike targets in
the central Soviet Union. However,
rather than delay deployment by the 6 months to a
year needed to redesign the first
stage, the Air Force neatly resolved the problem by
moving the first Minuteman wing
from Vandenberg to Malmstrom AFB, Montana. The move
had two advantages. First,
since Malmstrom was 600 miles farther north, the move
put the missiles that much
closer to their targets in the Soviet Union.
Malmstrom’s 3,500-foot elevation was also a
plus because it made boosting the missiles into space
easier.
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