Word: interceptive
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...press handled Nixon's ABM announcement routinely, there was anxiety and outrage in Canada. Since the first Safeguard bases would be a few miles south of the Canadian border, and since Chinese or Soviet ICBMs would come in over the North Pole, the nuclear-armed ABMs sent to intercept them would probably be detonated over Canada. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau was kept posted of Lyndon Johnson's Sentinel plans, but he was not informed in advance of President Nixon's switch to Safeguard. In an emergency debate in Ottawa, Socialist Leader Tommy Douglas protested: "Canada...
...differences between the Johnson Administration's Sentinel program and Nixon's Safeguard are more in emphasis than in scale. Johnson's 17 Sentinel sites would have covered all the continental U.S., Hawaii and Alaska with Spartan rockets designed to intercept incoming missiles up to 400 miles above target, backed up by shorter-range Sprints to knock down any ICBMs that penetrated the Spartan screen. Nixon's plan, while providing extensive area defense, will concentrate not only on Minuteman ICBMs in their concrete silos, but also on bomber bases, Washington, and the Charleston base for Polaris submarines...
...President explained it, the aims of his program are threefold. One is "protection of our land-based retaliatory forces against a direct attack by the Soviet Union." This is the strongest reason. The system could probably intercept a significant part of a massive Russian first strike against U.S. missile sites. The weakness of the argument, as critics point out, is that protection of the U.S.-based deterrent is not really necessary, because with its seaborne Polaris missiles and foreign-based bombers carrying H-bombs, the U.S. would retain a sufficient retaliatory strike force...
SPARTAN: the big-punch, long-range missile in the overall anti-missile defense system called Sentinel. Spartan would be installed at most of the ABM sites as the first line of defense, its mission being to intercept attacking RVs (reentry vehicles, or warheads) while they are still above the atmosphere, hundreds of miles from their targets. Spartan performs a regional, or "area-defense," role...
SABMIS (seabased ABM Spartan-or Sprint-type weapons): a concept, now in an early phase of study, that involves mounting defensive missiles on surface vessels so as to intercept enemy warheads before the landbased defensive system could reach them. Among its advantages is the possibility of destroying an enemy missile before it could scatter a number of separate warheads and decoys...