Word: icbms
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Some types of MlRVs face special restrictions. For example, MlRVed ICBMs and submarine-launched missiles together cannot exceed 1,200. And under that ceiling, MlRVed ICBMs are limited to 820. The reason for this stricter limit is that the land-based ICBMs, by combining enormous thrust with deadly accuracy, pose an especially great threat to the U.S.-Soviet balance. Neither side, moreover, can test or deploy an ICBM armed with more than ten MIRVs or a submarine-launched missile with more than 14 MIRVs. To prevent several missiles from being fired from the same launcher, the treaty forbids testing...
...Director Stansfield Turner took a hard line at a number of meetings of the Special Coordination Committee: SALT II should forbid the Russians to engage in any encryption whatsoever in their ICBM tests. Vance and Warnke felt Turner went too far. After all, they reasoned, SALT entitles the U.S. to some but not all information about Soviet missile tests. For instance, the number of warheads on a rocket and its payload or throw weight would be governed by SALT II, but not the nature of the guidance system. Therefore encryption should be constrained but not banned altogether...
...most serious sticking point during the first two days of the talks concerned how much smaller the Soviets could make a modified version of an existing type of ICBM without that modification being classified as the one "new type" that each side was to be allowed under the treaty. In April 1978 the U.S. had proposed a limit of plus or minus 5% on any change in the length of the rocket booster, the diameter, the weight of the rocket at launch and the throw weight of an existing type of ICBM. The U.S. proposed some additional parameters as well...
...compromise to break the deadlock. Vance told Dobrynin that the U.S. would agree to ban the testing of multiple-warhead cruise missiles if the Soviets would return to their original acceptance of plus or minus 5% as the permissible change in the size and weight of an existing ICBM...
That left Vance and Dobrynin faced with only a pair of mostly symbolic problems involving the American Minuteman ICBM: a loophole in the warhead freeze that would have left the U.S. free to increase the Minuteman's MIRV load from three to seven, and the lingering Soviet complaint about the protective shelters over the Minuteman silos at Malmstrom Air Force Base, which the Soviets claimed blinded their spy satellites. Vance and Dobrynin might have announced an agreement two weeks ago. But the Soviets were not yet ready to commit themselves to a time and date for the Carter-Brezhnev summit...