Word: abm
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...that it can cheaply and easily offset any improvement in defenses. This theory also presupposes antagonists of roughly equal strength and technological development. The equations all changed when, in the mid-'60s, the Chinese developed their own rudimentary nuclear program. Now there were two threats to consider, and pro-ABM pressure rose accordingly...
...Guards had got their hands on a couple of ICBMs!" At the same time, the Russians resisted Lyndon Johnson's initial attempts to open negotiations aimed at checking the nuclear-arms race. Moscow made no secret of the fact that it was going ahead with its own ABM. As early as 1962, Nikita Khrushchev bragged that his anti-missile weapon could...
...conditions. The warheads have been detonated in underground explosions, to be sure, and the missiles that carry them have been launched, but the 1963 nuclear Test-Ban Treaty prohibits nuclear explosions in space. Even without this veto, it would be fantastically difficult to stage a realistic war game featuring ABM...
...lack vital data about the attacking missiles and about ABM performance," says Wiesner, who calls Sentinel "that Edsel of ABM's." "So we just pick some numbers that seem rational and we use them to make whatever point serves our purpose." Ted Kennedy quotes the Budget Bureau's Richard Stubbing, who evaluated $40 billion worth of aircraft and missile projects initiated since 1955 and concluded that "less than 40% of the effort produced systems with acceptable electronic performance." The implication, of course, is that if technology cannot perfect relatively simple devices, it seems highly improbable that the infinitely complex ABM...
Russia and the U.S. are both capable of throwing up a variety of diversionary objects. Metallic balloons, dummy warheads, masses of tiny metal strips called chaff, can all be employed to confuse the defenders and force them to waste precious ABMs. The presumption has been all along that the Chinese, who do not yet have an ICBM force in being, could not produce so sophisticated a first-generation missile. Still, Peking will certainly develop its missiles with a broad general knowledge of U.S. defense concepts. "Their deployment," Bethe said recently, "will probably be determined by our ABM system. How long...