Word: overwhelming
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...separated warheads are vastly more difficult to find and distinguish from decoys. On re-entry, the decoys burn up, and only the warheads continue to plunge through the atmosphere. But if there are, say, 5,000 left out of an original launch of 10,000, they could easily overwhelm any conceivable "terminal" defense. Besides, by then it might be too late to prevent terrible damage. Warheads can be set to detonate if struck by interceptor rockets or projectiles, and though hardened missile silos are almost impervious to anything except a direct hit, nuclear explosions even in the upper atmosphere...
...Sandinistas have fought back, especially against the F.D.N., by sending troops to overwhelm rebel strongholds. When the opportunity for an ambush arises, the government dispatches its version of the Green Berets: one of several elite battalions about 600 strong trained in antiguerrilla warfare by North Korean and Vietnamese military advisers in 1983. The Sandinistas have a big edge in modern equipment, like Soviet AK-47 rifles and T-55 tanks. The rebels are nervously waiting for the Sandinistas to deploy their new Hind-D helicopters, which can fly 200 m.p.h. and carry air-to-surface missiles...
...effective at the margin." Translation: It must be cheaper to add new defenses than new offensive systems. If it were cheaper to build new offensive weapons, he said, it would just set off a new and dangerous round in the arms race as each side looked for ways to overwhelm the other's defenses. "If the new technologies cannot meet these standards," said Nitze in a speech to the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia, "we are not about to deploy them...
...They realized in the early '70s that virtually no matter what they did to defend themselves, in the end offense would always prevail. That fact seemed built into the sheer destructiveness of nuclear weapons and the relative ease with which one side could proliferate its offenses in order to overwhelm the other side's defenses...
Certainly they were a love match, as royal marriages go. Nonetheless, Rhodes James is forced to report, they did have their scenes. She could fly into rages and overwhelm Albert with accusations of "want of trust, ambition, envy, etc. etc." About ambition, the Queen may have been right. The Prince's first tutor observed of Albert, "To do something was with him a necessity." He formed an alliance with the Tories, thereby becoming the last occupant of Buckingham Palace to meddle in partisan politics. But despite reading and annotating Foreign Office papers until he dropped, the Prince had a modest...