Word: sentineled
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...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...
Some critics, notably Cornell Physicist Hans Bethe, a Nobel prizewinner, and Dr. J. P. Ruina, former director of the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency, are more lenient. In testimony last week before the Senate Disarmament Subcommittee, they did not attack Sentinel's basic hardware. Bethe, in fact, called the components "well designed" and said he went along with the idea that Sprints should be used to protect Minuteman sites. Both Ruina and Bethe, however, were particularly critical of Spartan's role...
Army planners took the probability of Chinese technological improvement into consideration. Sentinel's original configuration put Spartan and MSR sites close to population centers with the idea of thickening the defenses later by adding Sprints, which must be near the points they defend. To move the installations away from densely populated areas would reduce the popular and political opposition to Sentinel, but would also deprive the major cities of the second line of defense that Sprint represents...