Word: sovietism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Deploying nuclear weapons on the oval tracks is intended to solve the most serious threat to the nation's land-based strategic arsenal: the possibility of a surprise Soviet attack obliterating nearly all of the 1,054 U.S. Minuteman and Titan iCBMs. Pentagon strategists have long believed that the best antidote to this vulnerability would be a mobile ICBM known as the MX. They had considered underground trenches, which proved vulnerable, and special planes, which proved very expensive...
...ramp and stopped at a shelter entrance. There it could: 1) deposit an MX in the shelter; or 2) remove one; or 3) do neither, but deceptively remain at the entrance for the time it would take to load or unload a missile. To prevent Soviet spy satellites from detecting what was going on, the TEL's actions would be completely shrouded by the "shield vehicle," another truck that straddles the TEL much as a turtle is covered by its shell...
...additional safeguard, every shelter will contain 96 tons of weights (about equal to the MX), which the TEL would pick up when it drops off a real missile. This would prevent Soviet sensors from discerning the change in the TEL's rumble that would be caused if it no longer carried a load. If the TEL suddenly seemed lighter, for instance, Moscow could conclude that it had deposited an MX at its last stop. The TEL would also carry equipment constantly emitting the same amount of gamma rays and heat as would be given...
With such multideception, the Pentagon is confident that a significant number of MXs can survive a Soviet attack. Should the President give the order, the missiles could be launched within one minute from the shelters or from the TELs...
After that bitter time in the Soviet, any effort to cure mankind's ailments was written off by Muggeridge as "liberalism," and thus beneath contempt. Education, he finds, "is a stupendous fraud perpetrated by the liberal mind on a bemused public, and calculated, not just not to reduce juvenile delinquency, but positively to increase it, being itself a source of this very thing." As for modern art: "A Picasso, after a lifetime's practice arrives at the style of the cave drawings in the Pyrenees." Progress, for Muggeridge, is arrogant optimism, a shaking of man's tiny...