Word: icbms
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Although put in a simplistic form, this scenario essentially duplicates the conclusion of the recently released Scowcroft report on America's strategic nuclear forces. The player of the game is the Soviet leadership the "enemy" is the U.S. ICBM force, and the end of the game brings greater stability and a more assured peace. But before that game gets moving, the Scowcroft report recommended a long, costly, and potentially dangerous "time-out" in the form of the MX missile...
...report argued that the highly accurate, nearly 100-ton MX, with ten warheads, is needed immediately to "remove the Soviet advantage in ICBM [intercontinental ballistic missile] capability" and goad Russia into serious arms-reduction negotiations. For the 1990s, however, the so-called Midgetman missile must be developed because, with one warhead to the MX's ten, it would make a less tempting target to the Soviets...
...enhance the two-phase plan on Capitol Hill and limit warhead totals, the commission wedded missile deployment to arms control. "The land-based ICBM cannot be preserved without arms control," said Commission Member John Deutch of M.I.T. "This was our truly unanimous view." However, the shift back to single-warhead missiles scrambles the prevailing mathematics of arms control. With this in mind, the commission recommended a different method of calculating strategic threats: counting the number of warheads and their size rather than the number of missiles possessed by each side. While the new math won prepublication plaudits from Pentagon officials...
...SALT II, the Kremlin accepted restraints on the number of ICBMs with multiple warheads, or MIRVS, and the number of warheads per type of ICBM. Those combined limits left the Soviets with an approximately 5-to-2 edge in land-based ballistic warheads. They also left them with enough of those warheads to raise the theoretical possibility of a crippling sneak attack against American ICBMs. Land-based missiles are the most menacing of all nuclear weapons because they are the most accurate and the most plausible instruments of a pre-emptive attack...
...Soviets have begun flight-testing two new models of ICBMs while improving the accuracy and hardening the silos of existing ones. "The Soviets have deployed more highly accurate MX-like ICBM warheads in each of the past three years than are contained in our entire MX program," said Weinberger. "They possess the ability to destroy a large percentage of our own Minuteman ICBMs in their silos, while still providing a substantial, and largely invulnerable, reserve...