Word: launchers
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...consultation with key Congressmen, the Scowcroft commission issued a report recommending that the MX proceed as a short-term, stopgap measure, but that Midgetman be the principal ICBM of the future. The report recommended that the Administration, in order to make room for numerous Midgetman missiles, lift the 850-launcher ceiling that had been incorporated into the original START proposal at the behest of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The report questioned the Administration's longstanding but widely contested claim that American ICBMs were already vulnerable to pre-emptive attack from the more numerous Soviet ICBMs, and it obliquely...
Meanwhile, Burt and others at the State Department were pushing their own new plan for START. It came to be called the "framework approach," and it would entail keeping launcher limits along the lines of both SALT II and the Soviet proposal in Geneva, but adding limits on warheads and cruise missiles. The U.S. would be giving up, once and for all, its attempt to focus exclusively on fast flyers, particularly MlRVed ICBMs. At the same time, the Soviets would have had to accept much more severe limits on their MlRVs than under their own proposal...
...that the Soviet position should be acceptable to the U.S. in anywhere near its entirety. For example, the Soviet of fer of two years ago to reduce launcher ceilings from the SALT II levels would still permit a threatening proliferation of ICBM warheads. Further, that offer was conditioned...
...Chiefs had two reasons for wanting a low launcher ceiling. First, the fewer ICBM silos and submarine tubes the Soviets were allowed, the fewer high-priority military targets the Chiefs would have to worry about being able to hit in a nuclear...
Second, a low launcher ceiling would enhance the rationale for their cherished MX. Since a single MX will carry ten warheads, it is an efficient way of fitting many warheads under a low launcher ceiling...