Word: safeguards
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...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...
Cornell Physicist Hans Bethe, a Nobel laureate who believes Safeguard to be sound in principle but not yet necessary to U.S. defense, replies that it is possible to intercept the enemy warheads with Sprints at altitudes below 30 miles, where radar blackout is not a serious problem. Further, the PAR installations are designed to overlap enough for one to take over the functions of another -at least in theory-if the second is blacked out or even physically destroyed by a missile that penetrates the ABM defenses...
...proposed, Laird estimates the price at $10.8 billion. Officials point out that annual review of the need for the program could cut the project off long before that much is spent. ABM critics argue, however, that the final cost will turn out to be much higher. They fear that Safeguard may be only the first segment of a greatly expanded "thick" deployment. Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri, a former Secretary of the Air Force, has put the cost of such a system as high as $400 billion, although even many of Safeguard's detractors find that figure outlandish...
Some of the opposition believe that Safeguard could be shelved by substantially hardening ICBM sites at a smaller cost ($6 billion to $7 billion). The Pentagon wants to do that in addition to Safeguard; the Air Force is already seeking out "hard rock" silo locations that would make ICBMs more resistant even to multimegaton near misses. Wiesner, Rathjens and Weinberg suggest that the number of ICBMs could be doubled for the price of Safeguard, which would mean that more than 1,000 missiles would survive an attack by the 420 SS-9s that the Pentagon's Foster hypothesized. Wohlstetter...