Word: sentinel
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Capitol Hill, the Senate particularly has been riven by the issue. Members have been choosing sides without regard to party affiliation. Last week the Foreign Relations Committee, which normally has no jurisdiction over weapons procurement, issued a formal call for delay in Sentinel's deployment. One of the committee's main arguments is that the ABM program contravenes the intent of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty just at a time when Moscow at last seems genuinely interested in exploring ways to curb the arms race. The ABM dispute may also provide the first major confrontation between Richard Nixon and his possible...
...sites and began physical work on the system. Some of the areas considered were choice suburban locations near big cities, and many of ABM's neighbors-to-be hollered their objections so loudly that their representatives in Congress had to take notice. For legislators who were already skeptical of Sentinel, time to do anything about it seemed to be running out. Since the first appropriations for construction and pro curement were approved last year, this year's defense budget might be the last opportunity to halt or slow the undertaking...
...presidential election might have served to bring the issue into focus earlier, but it failed to do so. It was the Johnson Administration that had started Sentinel, and Vice President Hubert Humphrey chose not to campaign against it then (he is now a vocal opponent). For his part, Nixon was warning against a possible "security gap" vis-à-vis the Soviet Union and thus encouraging the ABM's backers. A new Administration and a new Congress offered...
...entire scenario, of course, is theoretical. Dr. Jerome Wiesner of M.I.T., who was John Kennedy's science adviser, notes that Sentinel is "untestable" under anything approaching simulated combat conditions. The warheads have been detonated in underground explosions, to be sure, and the missiles that carry them have been launched, but the 1963 nuclear Test-Ban Treaty prohibits nuclear explosions in space. Even without this veto, it would be fantastically difficult to stage a realistic war game featuring...
...lack vital data about the attacking missiles and about ABM performance," says Wiesner, who calls Sentinel "that Edsel of ABM's." "So we just pick some numbers that seem rational and we use them to make whatever point serves our purpose." Ted Kennedy quotes the Budget Bureau's Richard Stubbing, who evaluated $40 billion worth of aircraft and missile projects initiated since 1955 and concluded that "less than 40% of the effort produced systems with acceptable electronic performance." The implication, of course, is that if technology cannot perfect relatively simple devices, it seems highly improbable that the infinitely complex...