Word: pentagon
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...President replied sharply and ad hominem. While Clifford was at the Pentagon, Nixon observed at his press conference, U.S. casualties were the highest since the war began. All that anyone agreed on in Paris during Clifford's tenure was the "shape of the bargaining table." But then, with what seemed to be uncharacteristic lack of caution, Nixon went Clifford one better on the schedule for troop withdrawal by saying: "I would hope that we could beat Mr. Clifford's timetable." Nixon's aides hastily explained that the President was only expressing a desire and not setting...
Both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. are already testing multiple missile launchers, although the U.S. is believed to have a wide lead. The Pentagon argues for continuing the tests, and for development of MIRV, on the grounds that the U.S. system is nearly operational and stopping tests would simply give the Russians a chance to catch up. The technical teams at work on MIRV in private industry would have to be disbanded, and they could not be rapidly reassembled in case the U.S.S.R. makes a dramatic breakthrough. On the other hand, the President is under considerable pressure to suspend MIRV...
...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...
...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 the Pentagon. Why, in the nuclear age, does the U.S. also need chemical...
...question remains: How and when does the Pentagon plan to use chemical and biological weapons? There are three basic roles that such weapons might play: aggressive, defensive or deterrent. The U.S. has yet to ratify the 1925 Geneva Protocol outlawing the use of chemical-biological weapons, though it did approve a 1966 U.N. resolution to the same effect. In 1943, Franklin Roosevelt pledged that the U.S. would use those weapons only if an enemy used them first. Under State and Defense Department pressure in 1959, however, Congress refused to make formal the "no first strike" rule. Still...