Word: nuclear
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Even in the absence of immediate new weapons deployments, the business of arms control is tremendously complex. Past agreements, such as the 1963 partial ban on nuclear-test explosions, were reached only after long negotiations and after Moscow and Washington came simultaneously to the conclusion that potential benefits outweighed the risks. Distrust between the two nations remains basic and deep. Intelligence experts and strategists deal in short-range "estimates" and long-range "assumptions" on what the other side is doing now and might do later. Military and intelligence professionals tend to be pessimists, and hence hawks. China's nuclear...
Warhead Nose Count. Unless such a moratorium is agreed to early in SALT, many experts believe, the chance of real progress toward arms limitation is small. If both the U.S. and the Soviet Union proceed to MIRV deployment, the ensuing uncertainty would make a freeze on nuclear weaponry almost impossible to achieve. Policing an agreement to regulate the number of warheads installed in missiles would not be feasible. Spy satellites can count launch vehicles, but not their contents. Even an inspector on the ground would have to take a missile nose cone apart and physically count the number of warheads...
...standard ballistic missile carries only one nuclear warhead. That has long seemed inefficient to Pentagon planners, considering the huge cost of missiles and the space required to store them. In the early 1960s, they developed the first improvement: a multiple warhead known as MRV (for Multiple Re-entry Vehicle). It is a relatively crude device that drops unguided from missiles in clusters of three warheads. Some MRVs have been placed on presently operational Polaris missiles. A further and major refinement is MIRV (Multiple Independently Targetable Re-entry Vehicle), which is similar to MRV but has its own propulsion and guidance...
...dark side of progress is man's spectacular skill at devising better and better ways to kill other men. The nuclear bomb, unfortunately, is not the end of it. There is also chemical and biological warfare, known as CBW, a fount of doomsday weapons that the U.S. and Russia have been rapidly developing. Until recently, the docility of Congress toward Pentagon planning forestalled any real review of the hush-hush CBW program with its secret appropriations. Now, prompted by press reports and rumors, emboldened by the general concern over U.S. military policy, congressional investigators are demanding answers from...
...possible role of chemical-biological weapons as deterrents, that is one of the principal justifications advanced by the military for their developments. It is possible that an enemy might refrain from attacking out of fear that the U.S. would respond with its own CBW, even though the U.S. nuclear deterrent would seem to be a more effective persuader. Chemical and biological weapons offer an additional combat option-something to occupy the considerable middle ground between conventional weapons and nuclear warheads. Such an option may or may not be an advantage. Defenders of the program contend that certain forms...