Gap Flap

Ever since the Russians began their space shots, an insistent array of U.S. military pundits, politicos and editorialists have charged that the U.S. is lagging behind the Russians in the missile race, is heading toward a disastrous missile gap in the 1960s, and is foolishly placing a balanced budget above adequate military defenses. Last week, at long last, Defense Secretary Neil McElroy, backed by "the best intelligence there is," rose to the challenge. With General Nathan Twining, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, McElroy went over to the Capitol to set the facts before the Senate Armed Services Committee, chaired by Georgia's Richard Russell. McElroy's theme: There is no missile gap. Points:

P: "We have no positive evidence" of any Soviet ICBM currently operational.

P: The U.S.'s 6,000-mile Atlas will be in the field and operational by July 1959, at least as soon as the Russian counterpart is ready.

P: Reports that the Russians will have 300 operational ICBMs by 1960 are "exaggerated."

P: Though the Russians lead in engines of greater thrust, "it doesn't make much difference, because the U.S. has the propulsion to get the weapon to the target."

P: The U.S. has the ability (through Air Force and Navy aircraft operating from a system of worldwide bases) "to deliver strategic weapons of such destructive power that the deterrent effect of this delivery capability would discourage any embarkation by the Sino-Soviet bloc in general war."

McElroy had hardly closed his mouth before Missouri's Democratic Senator and Presidential Aspirant Stuart Symington -who was Assistant Secretary of War for Air (1946-47) and first Secretary of the new Air Force (1947-50), when the

U.S. was asleep at the missile switch -went into counterattack in a prepared speech on the Senate floor. The missile gap, he cried, is not closed but widening. By 1961, he declared, the Russians will have four times the number of ICBMs in U.S. installations -and this because the Eisenhower Administration "is not planning to spend the necessary funds" to keep pace with the Soviets.

Basic point behind McElroy's statement of confidence is that the Administration has adopted a new definition of what "keeping pace" means. President Eisenhower, say his intimates, now holds that the U.S. has arrived at last at the proper plateau of defense needs, and the tough $40.9 billion defense budget is enough to keep it there. "The President," says one top White House aide, "now believes that we are entering a period in which we need to modernize our defense from year to year. We can already destroy everything." Hence, overlapping and duplicating methods of delivering the weapons of destruction are being eliminated. The nuclear-powered aircraft program was sliced; out went subsonic decoy missile Goose, the Rascal and the Martin Mace; out went the nuclear-powered Navy aircraft carrier and the Regulus II, Navy space research projects, the Army's liquid-fueled Corporal and Redstone missiles. Meanwhile sights were lifted on the Atlas and Titan intercontinental ballistic missiles programs, on the Navy's Polaris and the Air Force's new solid-fuel Minuteman. But there is some Pentagon grumbling that modernization itself has been slowed down by cuts in the important anti-missile program, in research and development funds, and by a short-range view of the space program.

If Symington proved nothing else, he sharpened the looming dispute on plateau v. chasm, which will get a thorough airing as the service chiefs and their civilian counterparts proceed on their long march to Capitol Hill. Taking the salute from the reviewing stand at joint hearings this week: the Democrats' own Lyndon Johnson, chairman of the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee and of the Aeronautical & Space Sciences Committee.

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