Word: rocketeers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...version of an existing type of ICBM without that modification being classified as the one "new type" that each side was to be allowed under the treaty. In April 1978 the U.S. had proposed a limit of plus or minus 5% on any change in the length of the rocket booster, the diameter, the weight of the rocket at launch and the throw weight of an existing type of ICBM. The U.S. proposed some additional parameters as well. The Russians wanted a shorter list, but in May they indicated they would accept plus or minus 5% as the bounds...
...limit on the increase or decrease in the length, diameter, launch weight and throw weight of an existing type of missile (this was a shorter list of parameters than the U.S. had originally sought). Nor could there be a change in the fuel type of an existing rocket, the number of stages, the maximum number of warheads or the minimum weight of individual warheads. These last two provisions were meant to prevent the Soviets from developing an SS-18 with a capacity to launch as many as 40 smaller warheads?four times as many as the ten-MlRV maximum...
American strategists have long feared that the land-based Soviet rocket force, with its core of Hydraheaded heavy monster missiles, might some day be able to destroy all 1,000 Minutemen in a preemptive strike. Brown and Aaron were tantalized by the idea of using SALT II to restrain the MlRVing of Soviet ICBMS in general and to reduce the number of heavy rockets in particular...
...rejected, a freeze on MIRVed heavies. Besides, Pentagon and CIA analysts had been saying for some time that the Soviet SS-19 rocket, technically classified as a light launcher, was more accurate and therefore at least as threatening as its brutish big brother, the heavy...
...SALT negotiators had been trying to get the Russians to accept a rule whereby once a given type of launcher had been tested with a MIRVed missile, all launchers of that type had to be counted as MIRVed, regardless of what kind of rocket they contained. Vance and Warnke felt it was more important for the Soviets to accept that rule for the future than it was to resolve the potential ambiguity that existed at D-and-P, especially since a similar ambiguity existed in a U.S. missile field at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, where MIRVed and unMlRVed...