Word: nuclear
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...other nuclear delivery systems, which include both B-52 and B58 bombers as well as smaller fighter-bomber aircraft...
...order to launch a first strike of the sort envisioned by Secretary Laird, the Soviets would need SS-9s with extraordinary accuracy and high reliability; they would need to solve the problem of coordinating an attack on our bombers and Minutemen; they would need to deal with our nuclear-armed tactical aircraft; they would need an effective antisubmarine-warfare system; and they would need a widespread ABM system. We find it unlikely that they will achieve any one of these capabilities, much less all of them...
...question about how well the U.S. ABM would work-or if it would work at all-turns on the vulnerability of its radar guidance. Without it, Spartan and Sprint would journey blind. A nuclear blast outside the atmosphere can create radar blackouts lasting critical tens of seconds, as both U.S. and Soviet tests demonstrated in the early 1960s. A "precursor warhead," launched just ahead of a missile attack and detonated as a kind of nuclear smoke screen for the following ICBMs, could black out U.S. perimeter acquisition radar and disrupt the ABM defense...
Another point is that the system requires the most complicated assemblage of sophisticated computers and other electronic gear ever put together, which raises doubts about its reliability-especially since by its nature it can never be tested under conditions accurately simulating a nuclear attack. Wiesner also contends that any ABM is limited by the defender's guessing about the technology of the weapons it is designed to intercept. The attacker can add chaff and decoys as "penetration aids" to confuse the defender's radar and exhaust the supply of ABMs. Says Wiesner: "I do not think the defender...
...weather conditions and the method of dispersal (from hand-held weapons to aerial sprays), the control of other agents, particularly biologicals, is likely to be so difficult that a vast majority of the victims would be noncombatants. Numerous chemical and biological weapons would probably be even more indiscriminate than nuclear bombs in destroying civilian populations. In addition, the ecological damage that CBW would visit upon the earth for generations might well surpass even the effects of nuclear fallout. Says Microbiologist Martin Kaplan, "Sudden disbalances in numbers or the insertion of new infective elements into evolutionally unprepared animal or plant life...