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By 1955, the short-lived glow of victory in World War II had been replaced by an escalating standoff between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The development of nuclear weapons and Soviet advances in rocket technology initiated an urgent drive to create a viable ballistic missile system that would serve as a deterrent against a nuclear attack on the U.S.
The national command structure entrusted RADM William F. "Red" Raborn with the charge of overseeing a seemingly impossible task: to
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create a ballistic missile that could be fired by a submarine, underwater, and could find its target up to 1,500 miles away. RADM Raborn's Special Projects (SP) Office would oversee this massive venture to create a wholly new kind of team that could develop and build a revolutionary weapon concept... in record time. Despite the fact that the original timeline of 10 years was cut in half, Raborn's SP team succeeded in delivering a working Polaris missile and the fleet ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) by 1960.
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