Word: nonnuclear
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...military wisdom in the West has held that Warsaw Pact armies so outnumber and outgun NATO that only nuclear arms could redress the balance. This conventional forces "gap" has legitimized NATO's reliance on nuclear weapons, which in turn has allowed the alliance to hold down its spending on nonnuclear forces. Now, however, with NATO's nuclear inventory likely to shrink, fears are surfacing that decades of nuclear dependence may have left the alliance with insufficient conventional clout to keep the peace...
Lieut. General James Abrahamson, director of the Strategic Defense Initiative, has confirmed that such a weapon, which he calls a "kind of nuclear shotgun with little pellets," is being developed under the code name Prometheus, despite SDI's supposedly nonnuclear status. It is only one among several new approaches to nuclear weaponry secretly under study in the nation's bomb-design shops, including the Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos national laboratories...
...American nuclear weapons: they give Europe a cheap means of avoiding the expenditures that would be necessary to build a conventional force capable of holding off the Warsaw Pact on the ground. For that matter, the U.S. has never been willing to spend the money required to support a nonnuclear defense of Europe...
...Many critics feel that the removal could be a serious strategic error. To begin with, the Soviets have a considerable advantage in conventional forces in Europe. NATO relies heavily on nuclear deterrence, while the Soviets have built up more nonnuclear strength. Said a British minister last week: "We're not comfortable with zero option. It would leave us at a terrible disadvantage given the Soviet Union's overwhelming superiority in tanks, planes and of course numbers...
...testing of smart rocks in space, because they do not represent new or exotic physical principles. With the exception of a long- wavelength infrared sensor, the SBKKVs involve no technical breakthroughs, says John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists, and the land-based interceptors are merely upgraded, nonnuclear versions of the ABM systems developed during the 1960s. Says Democratic Senator J. Bennett Johnston of Louisiana: "The Delta 180 test demonstrated obsolete technology that is ineffective and vastly expensive...