Word: 9s
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...MIRV genie back in the bottle. The system was conceived primarily as a countermeasure to the Soviet ABM. By multiplying the number of warheads, the reasoning went, the U.S. would be able to penetrate Russian defenses. In addition, MIRV was regarded as a hedge against the huge Soviet SS-9s, which have the punch to destroy Minutemen even in their hardened silos. Laird's critics make the persuasive point that if the Soviets are willing to limit their ABM defenses to Moscow, which seems likely, and to cease S59 deployments, the U.S. should be willing to phase...
...Louis complex will be kept busy producing the F-15 fighter, a contract that could eventually be worth $8 billion. But in the company's California plants, employment has dropped from 71,000 to 56,000, reflecting space cutbacks and dwindling orders for DC-8s and DC-9s. Grumman, despite a contract with a potential value of $5 billion to build the Navy's Mach 2 F-14 fighter plane, expects to lay off 1,200 engineers this year...
...scientific adviser to President Kennedy; George Rathjens, recently of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency; and Steven Weinberg, a physicist. In a critique released last week, the trio argued "In order to launch a first strike of the sort envisioned by Secretary Laird, the Soviets would need SS-9s with extraordinary accuracy and high reliability; they would need to solve the problem of coordinating an attack on our bombers and Minutemen; they would need to deal with our nuclear-armed tactical aircraft; they would need an effective antisubmarine-warfare system; and they would need a widespread ABM system...
Wohlstetter's own calculations agree with those of John Foster, the Pentagon's Director of Research and Engineering. Foster says that the Russians would need only 420 SS-9s to attack 1,000 U.S. silos-assuming that the SS-9s would each carry three separate five-megaton warheads. Foster concludes: "About 95% of the silos could be destroyed. This would mean 50 of the 1,000 Minuteman missiles would survive...
...rock" silo locations that would make ICBMs more resistant even to multimegaton near misses. Wiesner, Rathjens and Weinberg suggest that the number of ICBMs could be doubled for the price of Safeguard, which would mean that more than 1,000 missiles would survive an attack by the 420 SS-9s that the Pentagon's Foster hypothesized. Wohlstetter answers: "There are safer and cheaper ways of getting [an assured] force of a given size than to buy a much larger one, most of which is susceptible to annihilation...