Word: shielding
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Administration hopes to spend almost two billion dollars researching an ABM system next year. It envisions a five year program that will spend twenty four billion dollars by 1989 determining whether the concept is feasible. Recent studies indicate that the cost of constructing and adequate shield within twenty years would be $250-$500 billion...
Unfortunately a feasible ABM system remains a dream. It is the modern-day version of the French Maginot line--a large and expensive shield that will give us the illusion of safety, but will fail us should the final crisis ever come. Even the attempt to erect a ballistic missile defense will prove disastrous to national security. If we press ahead with Reagan's "star wars" concept, we will alienate our allies, spark a new arms race, and waste billions of dollars that could be better spent on conventional defense or social programs...
...EVEN MORE practical and immediate objection to the porposed system lies in the complex technology required. Even if only ten warheads breached our shield, they would wreak destruction on a scale never before witnessed by man. Yet in a full-scale attack, ten thousand warheads would be launched. They would come from all directions at the same time and at high speed. To stop every one would require, as a recent Foreign Affairs article by William E. Burrows points out, "a defensive system able to react with almost unbelievable speed and flawless lethality...
...build such a system even in the absence of a Soviet response would be a daunting task. However, as many years as we take to develop an ABM system, the Soviets will use to think up a means of circumventing it. Every proposed version of the "star wars" shield has an easily exploited weakness. The Russians could preemptively attack laser satellites. They could confuse tracking systems with thousands of decoy rockets. They could fire submarine-based missiles on low trajectories which couldn't be spotted. Of course, we might be able to solve some of these problems. But the Russians...
...last week began its own worldwide exercises, code-named Global Shield 84, designed to train bomber and missile crews for nuclear war. The maneuvers will include test firing of two Minuteman missiles from Vandenberg A.F.B., Calif., and the test launching of cruise missiles from B-52 bombers. The Pentagon said that it had notified Moscow of its plans, although the exercises "bear no relationship to any aspect of current international situations...