Word: packed
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Even if Dense Pack is defeated, however, there is no dominant sentiment in Congress for killing the missile outright. The research and development funds enjoy general support, if only as a way to keep some pressure on Soviet negotiators at the Geneva talks. "There's only one argument for the MX-the bargaining chip," says a key Republican leader. "You've got to have MX to go to the table with the Russians...
Putting all of America's MX eggs in one basket seems to defy common sense. But there is a certain logic to Dense Pack that can only be understood in terms of the strange and fearsome technology involved. The closer the Soviet missiles come to the 21-sq.-mi. Wyoming strip, the closer they come to each other. When the first finally explodes just above its target, its apocalyptic power is turned against fellow Soviet missiles. Its blast, and those of any succeeding warheads that manage to detonate, would cause mutual missile annihilation known in the lexicon of strategic...
...sound as Dense Pack may seem in the Pentagon's hard sell, many scientists believe it is fatally flawed. Says IBM Physicist Richard Garwin: "Fratricide may well be true, but it is irrelevant because it can be defeated." The Soviets, for example, could avoid Fratricide by dropping a single warhead at a time, beginning with the southern end of the Wyoming strip, at a rate of one every 20 to 40 sec. Strategists call such a barrage Slow Walk. The Pentagon says that the first detonations would leave so many particles in the atmosphere that the incoming warheads would...
...second of one another to avoid Fratricide-a capability, U.S. intelligence sources optimistically estimate, that will not be achieved by the Soviets for at least ten years. Says Berkeley Physicist Charles Townes, a key Pentagon adviser: "The Soviets are resourceful guys, fully capable of developing ways to counter Dense Pack sooner than anybody expects...
...Dense Pack depends on many calculations and assumptions, most of them untested and untried, perhaps happily so. If only one of them proved wrong (for example, that the U.S. can build silos and subterranean communications centers able to withstand the effects of a nuclear blast), Dense Pack might fall apart like a house of cards. And scientists are all too familiar with that law of Mr. Murphy: if anything can go wrong...