Word: silo
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...first time nuclear "charges," meaning warheads. In the past, the Soviets had agreed to limit only launchers, which allowed their missiles to be loaded up with multiple warheads. The Soviets also alluded to setting a ceiling on the number of land-based missiles. The U.S. considers these big "silo busters" to be the most destabilizing element in the Kremlin's nuclear arsenal, because they give the Soviets the capacity to launch a first strike that could devastate America's land-based missiles...
Enough is enough. Of course foreigners benefit from our technology, just as we benefit from Swiss watches and Japanese cars. But while information can be obtained, a missile silo cannot, as the purposefully vague Reaganese threats would like us to infer. The Administration's spy-hunting hype has passed the bounds of mediocre entertainment to the point where it now threatens the most fundamental freedoms of our more or less open society. With all its shadowy accusations and logical pratfalls, the Administration must not be allowed to dupe the public into fearing Commies when it should fear abridgements...
...leading antagonist of the MX was Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee. Nunn and others have criticized the Government's plan to place the highly accurate ten-warhead missiles in existing Minuteman missile silos. Critics say that the immobile basing system makes the MX vulnerable, and a likely target for Soviet attack. Since March, Nunn has proposed limiting the number of silo-based MX's to 40, and last week he offered an amendment to the pending $302 billion defense authorization bill. When Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole realized that Nunn had enough...
...current plan is to base 100 missiles in existing Minuteman silos in eastern Wyoming and western Nebraska, the very storage points that were deemed indefensible at the beginning of the program. Theoretically, by firing just two warheads per MX silo, the Soviets could destroy the entire arsenal, taking out up to 1,000 U.S. warheads. The same attack could score less than a third as many "kills" against the Minutemen, since they are armed with a maximum of only three warheads. Thus, charge MX critics, by dangling a more threatening target in front of Soviet military strategists, yet failing...
...Administration, which decried what it saw as a "window of vulnerability" in U.S. missile power before it took office in 1981, contends that the Minuteman silos can be "hardened" with additional concrete. But whether they would be strong enough even then is doubtful. In an attempt to defuse the issue, Air Force General Bennie Davis, commander of the Strategic Air Command, vainly sought to convince a congressional subcommittee three weeks ago that the "window" expression was shorthand not for silo exposure but for overall strategic inferiority...