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Show $3eliinci lite leacliineA President Eisenhower's seventh and next to last State of the Union Message to the 86th Congress Con-gress followed the time-honored ' custom. The Constitution requires re-quires that the President deliver a sort of "annual report" on the state of the union in person, the only personal address a President Presi-dent is required to make, and that's, all the message is meant to be. He spoke in the expected generalities, gen-eralities, with members of the Senate and House, and country at large, really awaiting more specific budget and economic messages and more detailed legislative leg-islative messages the President will have delivered to Congress in the next few weeks ahead. In the meantime, the reaction to the President's State of the Union Message has also followed time-honored custom. Members of the President's own party praised it, for the most part, and the opposition cautiosuly criticized criti-cized it, said it awaited the more specific proposals or went about making plans of its own, ignoring ignor-ing the President's proposals. The President's State of the Union message would also appear, ap-pear, a week later, to have been adequately commented on. Yet ironically, one of the most astounding, as-tounding, or alarming, points passed over by the President has been barely discussed. This is that the United States is entering a whole new era of astronomical spending, even as President Eisenhower struggles -'ii bravely, Democrats say unrealis- tically, to keep present U. S. spending in tow. U. S. Budgets have been sub-. sub-. jected to a series of specific pressures pres-sures in the past two'decades beginning be-ginning in 1939. Without producing pro-ducing specific figures, , since ciphers alone would almost fill this column, U. S. spending eras, regardless of which party has occupied oc-cupied the White House, can be divided into the following: 1939-1946 which covered the cost of preparing for and waging wag-ing World War II and meeting the immediate leftover costs, 1947-1949 covering the Marshall Mar-shall plan period, during which U.S. economic aid to Western Europe was emphasized, 1950-1953 which covered the Korean War period during which military spending to strengthen the Free World became the dominating dom-inating feature of postwar bud-. bud-. gets, 1954-57 during which great new demands for U. S. economic aid to the largely overlooked Afro-Asian and underdeveloped nations began and in 1958, the Space Era began after Russia's Sputnik in 1957. President Eisenhower made : several references to the Space ' era in his message. He mentioned that the Soviet achievements in the missiles and rockets field are "indeed brilliant," as he expressed ex-pressed it, and also said reassuringly reassur-ingly that the U. S. is now mak ing great strides in peaceful and military rocketry. He also had some revealing words to say about the cost of the U.S. missiles program. These were not, for security reasons, detailed completely. U. S. Senators Sen-ators and House members calmly listened as the President said that this year we are investing some $7,000,000,000 in missiles programs alone almost a tenth of the proposed $77,000,000,000 budget! But to a man members of the 86th Congress actually gasped in surprise when the President mentioned that the expense of putting intercontinental Atlas missiles into the armed forces will alone average $35,000,000 a missile! In doing this, the President skillfully brought home the costs of the new U. S. Space Age. There is no reason here to go into all that could be done with the $35,000,000 it costs us for each Air Force Atlas missile we will develop, test, replace, redesign rede-sign and finally use in scientific tests or just poise around the world for possible war in the year ahead. It is even more astounding to realize that as new scientific developments de-velopments continue, the whole Atlas program on which $35 million is spent for each missile, mis-sile, will itself be outdated. The Air Force has already disclosed that when tested successfully, Its newest biggest ICBM, the Titan, will make the Atlas look like a children's toy. It can also be revealed here for the first time that the Titan, when tested, is. the missile with which the Air Force hopes to send a rocket to the planets Mars and Venus, probably within the next 90 days. The past year, during which most of the U. S. missiles dollars for Space was spent on the now-obsolete now-obsolete Vanguard program, has seen each hundred miles made in Space cost nearly $200,000,-000 $200,000,-000 for research, development, production and tests. Now the President has disclosed that the really big missiles under development devel-opment are costing forty times as much, or $7 billion, more than a year ago. Best estimates are that it cost about $2 billion to launch our Atlas "talking" satellite to an altitude of 928 miles and our best moon shoot thus far some 70,000 miles. But the plante Venus and Mars or even the sun into whose orbit th Russians have placed their latest satellite, are measured in the tens of millions of miles. If U. S. budgets each year of the new Space Age we are in are to be multiplied by distances like these, or to the basis of costly per-mile into Space, the costs as well as the achievements will indeed be astronomical. For our budgets and. State of the Union messages are now "going out of this world!" |
