Word: silos
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...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...
...glitches that have dogged the MX for more than a dozen years have occurred in just about everything except its basic technology. The weapon was conceived as a counter to the new generation of Soviet missiles whose accuracy rendered the silo-based U.S. Minuteman increasingly vulnerable. But the MX until 1983 was a missile in search of a home, or basing mode. In an effort to make it "survivable," or impervious to a Soviet first strike, Pentagon planners studied at least 37 basing ideas, including one that would have kept the MX arsenal permanently airborne and another that would have...
...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...
...research program cannot be predicted, the problems being faced and some of the ways in which they might be overcome are reasonably clear. Every proposal for a missile defense system begins with a profile of an enemy nuclear attack. In its roughly 30-minute flight from a silo in Siberia to detonation on top of a Minuteman silo in North Dakota--or above the White House--a Soviet warhead would go through four well-marked stages: 1) Boost. The rocket engines of, say, an SS-18 missile push it up through the atmosphere and into space. 2) Post-boost...