Word: mx
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...makes. In early April the President must choose a multibillion-dollar plan for modernizing the nation's land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles. Though dozens of basing modes and several new missiles have been considered, only two expensive mobile missile systems are really in the running: the rail-carried, multiwarhead MX and the truck-transported, single- warhead Midgetman. Bush's wisest course might be to deploy neither...
...submarines, and nuclear bombs carried by airplanes. But over the years, the increased accuracy of Soviet ICBMs has gradually threatened the land-based leg of the triad, which consists of 450 Minuteman IIs, each carrying a single warhead; 500 Minuteman IIIs tipped with three warheads; and 50 more modern MX's, each with ten warheads. The Administrations of Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan considered 30 or so ideas for rendering U.S. ICBMs less vulnerable to Soviet attack. But as a report co- authored by former Defense Secretary Harold Brown noted, all the proposals were rejected because they failed...
...defense funding, Nunn had a kindred spirit in Carter's successor. But he clashed repeatedly with President Reagan over specific weapons systems. He didn't then, and still doesn't, think there is "anything magical" in the Navy's desire for 15 aircraft-carrier battle groups. He engineered the MX compromise, cut back Reagan's grandiose plans and today favors the single-warhead Midgetman over a rail-based MX. He described as "fantasy" Reagan's dream of a nationwide Star Wars shield and fought the former President's insistence that the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty permitted the expanded testing...
...deadly MX missile, which carries ten nuclear warheads, is stationed in hardened concrete silos designed to withstand a near-miss by an atom bomb. But at least one of the 50 MX's deployed by the Air Force over the past three years has trouble standing up. The Pentagon confirmed last week that the warheads from five MX's at the F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming were removed after one of the rockets slipped from its moorings and fell as much as a foot inside its underground silo last August. An investigation determined that the missile's fall...
Dukakis has called SDI a "fantasy," but said he would allocate about $1 billion a year for research, to be ready to respond to any Soviet advances. He opposes both the MX and Midgetman missiles, but supports the B-1 bomber and the Stealth bomber...