Word: icbms
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, who favored the "big bird" scheme of putting the MX on continuously flying aircraft, last year urged that the MX be placed temporarily in specially hardened silos that now contain the Minuteman, the nation's dominant ICBM. The 1,000 Minutemen currently deployed carry a total of more than 2,100 warheads. Congress rejected that option on the ground that the MX would remain as vulnerable as the Minuteman is claimed to be, because new Soviet rockets are so accurate that a first strike could conceivably wipe the MX out. The lawmakers threatened...
Reagan's lecture last week would have been more instructive if he had used a chart showing total strategic ballistic missile warheads rather than just ICBM launchers. Such a chart would have shown the two sides roughly equal with upwards of 7,000 warheads, since America's 5-to-2 advantage in SLBM warheads helps offset the Soviets' 5-to-2 advantage in ICBM warheads...
...accepts the proposal for deep reductions in strategic weapons that Reagan unveiled last May. That possibility, however, is at odds with the official Administration position, reiterated privately after the President spoke, that the U.S. needs the densely packed MX in any event. The Administration has proposed a ceiling on ICBM warheads of 2,500 per side. The U.S. now has 2,152. A hundred MXs could have as many as 1,000 warheads. Therefore, in order to stay within its own proposed ceiling, the U.S. would have to give up some 600 warheads. But it could do that by retiring...
...back burner, the U.S. should concentrate in the near term on building up its conventional forces and its more purely retaliatory weapons systems like cruise missiles, which are too slow to threaten a sneak attack. Reagan himself, in presenting his START proposal, has argued that ICBM warheads, because they can be hurled at their targets so quickly, are potential first-strike weapons and therefore destabilizing, while slower-flying cruise missiles and bombers enhance stability. Some of the money allocated for Dense Pack would be better spent on what Reagan calls "slow-flyers" in the next few years...
...Soviets are on the brink of acquiring a mobile ICBM right now. They were working on one, called the SS-16, until 1977, but were persuaded during SALT II to cancel that program. The SS-16 is a three-stage big brother of the two-stage SS-20 intermediate-range ballistic missile that has upset the military balance in Europe. Late last year, the old SS-16 test site at Plesetsk, near the White Sea in northwestern Russia, was the scene of fresh activity, suggesting that the program might be started up again on short notice...