Word: icbm
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...matter what the scenario. A flexible weapon, it is equally effective on hard (silo) or soft (city) targets and useful in either strategic or tactical war. Accurate up to a few feet, the cruise zig zags to avoid defenses and subsequently can penetrate USSR airspace as successfully as ICBM...
...ICBM was propelled out of a canister by a burst of steam. Then a solid-fuel engine kicked in, and the missile began its 4,100-mile flight from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base. In 30 minutes, its six dummy warheads splashed down where they were aimed in the South Pacific, near Kwajalein atoll. The target was apt: in the same Marshall Islands chain is Bikini atoll, site of the first peacetime atomic blast 36 years ago next week...
...warheads, is not on the table as far as the Soviets are concerned. It would require them to scrap 57% of their 5,900 land-based missile warheads. The U.S., by contrast, currently deploys only 2,146 land-based missile warheads, and thus would be able to increase its ICBM " warhead inventory...
...recommendations, the Commission introduced a final pill which shouldn't be hard to swallow at all. The pill is Midgetman, a small, mobile missile with a single warhead that could be produced in large numbers, if needed, at relatively low cost. Such a non-threatening, land-based ICBM follows naturally from the Commission's argument that the "window of vulnerability" was never open in the first place. And of course, the real selling point of the little missile as opposed to the giant MX is its stabilizing influence...
Reagan has called the recommendation a "desirable evolution to ward small, single warhead ICBMs" it may have been MX that ensured the White House would take Midgetman and the other points seriously. But the giant ICBM will dominate the years between now and any deployment of a smaller weapon probably in the mid 1990s...