Word: attacker
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Doubtless, a feeling of defensiveness accounts for some of the flag clutching. But obviously there is more involved. Those who attack the standard also attack what it represents. Those who flaunt Old Glory are using it as an ensign of reassurance that discontent has its limits...
...system proposed by the President and Defense Secretary Melvin Laird is designed primarily to protect U.S. offensive missiles against surprise attack, and also to provide a measure of defense for U.S. cities if an enemy should launch a few missiles at them by accident or by design. Strategically, the argument for the project is that if an ABM defense guaranteed the survival of enough missiles to inflict prohibitive damage on an attacker's homeland, the aggressor would be deterred from risking the first strike...
...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. We find it unlikely that they will achieve any one of these capabilities, much less all of them...
...within U.S. capabilities, he argues, and to be safe, the U.S. must assume that anything it can do the Soviet Union can eventually do too. Wohlstetter questions Rathjens' conclusion that, at worst, "a quarter of our Minuteman force could be expected to survive a Soviet pre-emptive S59 attack." Wohlstetter complains that Rathjens overestimates by two-thirds the blast resistance of U.S. silos and unjustifiably assumes that the Soviet multiple warheads would carry only one-megaton payloads. "Where scientists differ," he concedes, "laymen may be tempted to throw up their hands and choose to rely on the authority...
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...