Word: safeguard
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Four months ago, President Nixon announced his decision to go ahead with deployment of an anti-ballistic-missile system called Safeguard. This week the issue is scheduled to come before the Senate, probably for more of the acrimonious debate that has divided scientific experts, politicians and laymen. The essence of the argument...
...What is Safeguard supposed...
...Safeguard system has four key elements. PAR (perimeter acquisition radar) detects an enemy ICBM at long range some time after it has been launched, calculates its path, and then passes the missile track along to the less powerful but much more complex MSR (missile site radar). MSR then directs two types of ABMs against the incoming warheads. The long-range Spartan is designed to make an intercept above the atmosphere, at altitudes between 200 and 400 mi. The smaller Sprint would seek out and destroy warheads that penetrated the Spartan screen by intercepting them within 40 miles of the target...
Albert Wohlstetter of the University of Chicago, an articulate defender of Safeguard, disagrees. All these things are within U.S. capabilities, he argues, and to be safe, the U.S. must assume that anything it can do the Soviet Union can eventually do too. Wohlstetter questions Rathjens' conclusion that, at worst, "a quarter of our Minuteman force could be expected to survive a Soviet pre-emptive S59 attack." Wohlstetter complains that Rathjens overestimates by two-thirds the blast resistance of U.S. silos and unjustifiably assumes that the Soviet multiple warheads would carry only one-megaton payloads. "Where scientists differ," he concedes...
...President's "footprint" statement was yet another disclosure of normally secret intelligence material to bolster the chances for approval of the embattled ABM. For the White House regards its Safeguard anti-ballistic missile system as the answer to the presumed Russian MIRV threat. Among his other warnings, Secretary Laird has said that the Russians are developing an ABM system of their own that can "loiter for a period of time until a specific target is selected...