Word: silo
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...strategic experts are challenging the fundamental assumption: that land-based missiles are as vulnerable as some other experts fear. There is considerable doubt that the Soviets could actually attack U.S. ICBMs with impunity. Studies by the Pentagon suggest that even if the Soviets aimed two warheads at each U.S. silo, they could count on destroying only 65% to 80% of the ICBMs. That would leave at least 400 land- based U.S. warheads -- each packing about 20 times the destructive force of the Hiroshima bomb -- for a counterattack on the Soviet Union. Moreover, the Soviets would always have to fear that...
...modern missile submarines and the 4,700 on its bombers. Though the first operational test last week of a Trident II missile resulted in a spectacular pinwheeling explosion, that failure was at worst a temporary setback for a weapon that will give the U.S. a sea-based silo-killing capability for the first time. In fact, it is the Soviet Union, not the U.S., that has a real problem with the survivability of its nuclear forces, since as many as 55% of its warheads are concentrated in vulnerable land-based silos. That explains why Moscow has developed the rail- mobile...
...critical question thus becomes which of the missiles to buy. The ten- warhead MX, which Reagan dubbed the Peacekeeper, is a proven, highly accurate ICBM. In one option, the 50 MX's already deployed in ICBM silos would be supplemented by another 50 "garrisoned" on special railroad cars stationed on military bases. If a U.S.-Soviet confrontation loomed, the missiles would be moved out on 180,000 miles of railway across the nation. The main advantage of this scheme is its relatively low price tag: an estimated $12 billion for 50 missiles carrying 500 warheads. A somewhat cheaper option...
...worrying about day-to-day survival. The winter has been unusually harsh. With the exception of the Salang Highway, roads into the city are cut, resulting in shortages of bread, diesel fuel, sugar, kerosene and other basics; electricity is available only part of the time. The Kabul grain silo, which usually holds a stock of 20,000 tons, has been empty at several points in the past few weeks. The poor are especially vulnerable because they cannot afford to shop at relatively well-stocked black-market outlets where bread is sold for more than a dollar a loaf, ten times...
...deadly MX missile, which carries ten nuclear warheads, is stationed in hardened concrete silos designed to withstand a near-miss by an atom bomb. But at least one of the 50 MX's deployed by the Air Force over the past three years has trouble standing up. The Pentagon confirmed last week that the warheads from five MX's at the F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming were removed after one of the rockets slipped from its moorings and fell as much as a foot inside its underground silo last August. An investigation determined that the missile's fall...