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Changing the subject, the President turned to General Twining and said that in all the subject matter of the Gaither report he
was most interested in the alert position and in the retallatory
power of the United States. He said he understood that General Twining now had 31 SAC bases. Suppose that we got down to placing one
squadron of B-52 heavy bombers on each base. How much time would be
required to get off 15 planes under ideal conditions, including ideal
warning? General Twining replied that it would teke about 20 minutes
under ideal conditions.
The President addressed a second question to General Twining
on the subject of alert. It had seemed to the President, he said,
that the Air Force visualized a long period of time in the future in
which our main reliance would still be placed on manned aircraft. Was
this correct? If so, the President felt that money expended on improving the early werning system and the dispersal of SAC bases would be
money well spent.
,
Thereafter the President indicated considerable anxiety about
the necessity of proceeding to the production of certain ballistic misslles without full testing of these missiles, although he realized that
Secretary McElroy believed that it was necessary to follow this course
of action. In any case, the President counseled that after achieving
the production of a certain number of such ballistic missiles--the number deemed absolutely necessary--we should flatten out the production
curve until further testing had resulted in the perfecting of the missiles in question.
Reverting to the discussion of the release of the Gaither
report to members of Congress, Mr. Gordon Gray said he hoped that the
President had not completely excluded the possibility of releasing a
summary of the Gaither report, because Mr. Gray felt that what was
being publicly said about the contents of the Gaither report was mch
worse than what the Gaither report itself had stated. The President
replied that he had not excluded this possibility.
Secretary Dulies said that in any case he would like to
know what answer to make when this question was put to him on the
Hill. As an alternative to issuing a summary or a sanitized version
of the Gaither report, Secretary Anderson recommended that an oral
briefing of the contents of the Gaither report be given to selected
members of the appropriate Congressional committees. Secretary Anderson felt that something would have to be contrived by way of a
eee
aure from the usuel privileged handling of such reports to the
8
t.
The President, again changing the subject, expressed a certain degree of skepticism as to the wisdom of expending billions of
dollars on a Shelter Program as opposed to spending the money on additional measures of active defense.
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