Units equipped with the U.S. Air Force’s first operational surface-to-surface missile—the mobile, winged Matador, capable of striking targets in the Warsaw Pact from sites in West Germany—deploy from their fixed day-to-day sites to unannounced dispersed launch locations. This alert is in response to the crisis posed by the major Soviet attack on Hungary, which brutally suppresses the Hungarian Revolution.
The Air Force Research Laboratory has signaled to industry it wants to develop a low-cost hypersonic cruise missile to deliver a wide range of payloads at a range up to 500 nautical miles.