Word: icbm
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Minuteman II has been flashing its red light with disconcerting frequency. The nation's most advanced operational ICBM, with a 7,500-mile range and a deadly megaton warhead, it has performed with 94.9% of maximum efficiency when test-fired under demonstration conditions at Cape Kennedy and other ranges. But when mounted in launching silos across the nation, sitting underground and waiting indefinitely for action, it develops minute but dangerously incapacitating problems...
Bugs in Components. Of the 1,000 Minutemen deployed in the U.S., 750 are the five-year-old shorter-range (6,300 miles) Minuteman I missiles. Thus, as the more effective Minuteman Us develop bugs in their intricate components, the nation's ICBM capability is seriously reduced. Minuteman II, when functioning perfectly, has range, flexibility and speed (about 30 min. to any target in Russia or China) unmatched by Minuteman I, the Navy's Polaris missiles (range: 2,875 miles) or, of course, intercontinental bombers. Currently, 40% of the Minuteman Us are not operational or not on alert...
...factory for repair. Their ultra-subminiature integrated circuitry is still at best temperamental. Eventually, Air Force Secretary Harold Brown maintained last week, Minuteman II, only two years old and still evolving, will mature into a reliable vehicle. In the meantime, as the U.S. relies upon an overwhelming ICBM offensive to keep the Russians strategically in check, the failures of Minuteman II remain a dangerous flaw in the nation's armor...
Neutrons produced by the ABM blast could also cause crippling damage at a range of about two miles. Penetrating into the ICBM's outer shell of uranium 238, they can produce slow fission, causing heat that may deform the warhead or set off its lens charges. The neutrons may also whiz into the warhead's core of uranium 235, causing it to explode in a premature nuclear blast while still hundreds of miles from its target...
...ICBM two miles from the blast will receive only one-quarter of the X-ray energy that hits a missile one mile away. At a distance of three miles, the impacting X-ray energy will be only one-ninth as large...