Word: icbm
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...government major, I have to write papers about politics every week. At The Crimson, I have to edit columns about politics every day. John Locke, OMB, David Souter, ICBM, Richard Pipes, NRA. It gets tiresome. Where's the poetry? Where's the color? Where's the innovation...
...benign deception here. On almost every major question in START, the U.S. demanded, and got, its own way. The treaty is an improvement on the earlier SALT accords largely because Gorbachev was willing to give up the idea that the U.S.S.R. must keep a substantial numerical advantage in ICBM warheads to compensate for American superiority in other categories. In the START treaty Gorbachev is tacitly accepting a position of overall inferiority, at least in the near term, since he is giving up right away much of the U.S.S.R.'s principal strength, which is in land-based ballistic missiles, while allowing...
...back to the one subject where they could accomplish something -- arms control -- and the exercise became increasingly esoteric and rarefied. Like medieval theologians debating how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, the statesmen would % dicker over how many warheads would be allowed on a Soviet ICBM and how many cruise missiles would be allowed on an American bomber. Nuclear diplomacy also became more controversial because it involved cooperation and compromise with a feared and hated enemy. For example, the political opposition to SALT II, completed in 1979 but never ratified by the U.S. Senate, was based...
...whiz exploits in the gulf, the Patriot flies at only three times the speed of sound and covers only a narrow swath of real estate. It has no trouble dealing with the unsophisticated Scud, a Mach 4 weapon that has proved to be the Edsel of missiles. An ICBM warhead, on the other hand, enters the atmosphere at 15 times the speed of sound. A Patriot could scarcely get off its launcher before an ICBM did its damage...
...critical question thus becomes which of the missiles to buy. The ten- warhead MX, which Reagan dubbed the Peacekeeper, is a proven, highly accurate ICBM. In one option, the 50 MX's already deployed in ICBM silos would be supplemented by another 50 "garrisoned" on special railroad cars stationed on military bases. If a U.S.-Soviet confrontation loomed, the missiles would be moved out on 180,000 miles of railway across the nation. The main advantage of this scheme is its relatively low price tag: an estimated $12 billion for 50 missiles carrying 500 warheads. A somewhat cheaper option...