DEFENSE: Cream the Country?

Jaunty in sport coat and slacks, Defense Secretary Neil Hosier McElroy emerged from the three-day supersecret conference of top U.S. military leaders at Quantico, Va. last week with a word for reporters. He had nothing much to say about clamping down on interservice rivalry, nor about the decision that he must eventually, some day, take on what ground-to-air missiles the U.S. will deploy to defend itself. Instead Secretary McElroy noted that five of the.U.S.’s Atlas “operational” intercontinental missiles had failed in consecutive test firings, announced that Atlas would be delayed for “not less than 60 days,” while the Air Force and Convair try to find out what is wrong.

Then McElroy offered one of the strangest reassurances in military annals. The U.S. need not worry about the Atlas troubles, said he, because the Communists are having “serious trouble” with their intercontinental missile program, too. Still, the Communists are expected to get ten operational ICBMs by the end of 1959, but that was also not so “important,” because the Communists would need “some hundreds,” as McElroy put it, “to cream the country.”