Word: silo
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...might be sold and moved to Florida. After hearing a rumor to this effect almost annually, my initial reaction was: So what, I'd rather watch a good farm team play in an outdoor park than a second-rate major league team play in a football stadium cum missile silo...
...what strategists overlooked was the fact that the large number of warheads packed onto a small number of missiles make them a tempting target for a first strike. In a surprise attack, an aggressor could knock out as many as ten or more warheads by hitting a single silo. Says Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Sam Nunn, who strongly supports the Bush proposal: "I can see a regime on both sides where we have single-warhead missiles in silos. There is no reason to go first ((with a nuclear attack)) in that situation...
...about the U.S.S.R.: the place is a hopeless mess where nothing works, with the prominent and crucial exception of two institutions -- the armed forces and the KGB. A Kremlin that cannot put food on its people's tables can put an SS-18 warhead on top of a Minuteman silo in North Dakota, some 5,000 miles away. Even though 15% to 20% of the grain harvested on the collective farms rots or falls off the back of trucks before it reaches the cities, a Soviet-led blitzkrieg through West Germany would be a masterpiece of military efficiency...
...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...