Word: mirved
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Fully half of the Lab's $385 million appropriation is spent on weapons development, and the nocturnal thuds of high explosives testing tend to be reassuring rather than disruptive of sleep. Nuclear devices designed at the Lab end up as the heart of MIRV warheads in Minuteman missiles. The new Trident missile will carry a nuclear warhead designed at the Lab. Theoreticians and physicists specializing in thermodynamics are drilling holes into nearby sites to reach "hot rocks" that will provide geothermal power. A special reverence is held for LAMPF, the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility. There...
...Administration we had to fight a seemingly endless battle against those who wanted to fuel the momentum of negotiations with unreciprocated gestures of good will. Not a few argued, for example, that we should forgo our programs on antiballistic missiles (ABM) and multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRV) lest we doom the prospects of strategic arms limitation - though, in fact, ABM and MIRV turned out to be among our few playable cards. Similarly, we were warned that an opening to China would cause relations with the Soviet Union to regress; in fact, the opening would break a logjam...
...Secretary Harold Brown, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, his deputy, David Aaron, and Carter himself were all dissatisfied with the Vladivostok accord. Its subceiling of 1,320 multiple-warhead launchers allowed the two sides "freedom to mix" land-based and submarine-launched MlRVed missiles. The Soviets could concentrate their MIRV force on land, where
...limit, rather than an averaging approach, on cruise missiles aboard bombers. Since the Russians were yielding to the U.S. on the averaging approach, Gromyko continued, their earlier concession on the MIRV freeze was no longer operative. Sighed a haggard American official, paraphrasing Lenin, "One step forward, one step backward...
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...