Word: systemization
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...weeks, Leven planned to mount a completely new show. As he envisioned it, "It's going to concern an odyssey by subway after the subway moves into another mathematical system." By employing the odyssey archtype, Leven hoped to aim at flexibility within a series of developed episodes, dealing with a variety of Cambridge types. He insisted the new show would have structural, as well as intellectual, humor. It all sounded a shade too cerebral, but Leven was convinced that, at last, he had hit upon the solution...
...September 1967 speech to Congress, Laird's predecessor, Robert McNamara, described Sentinel as a "thin" system intended to meet the threat of a missile attack from China through 1975. No system, McNamara said, could be adequately effective against Russia's sophisticated arsenal, and he opposed any attempt to develop one. Russia would respond only by developing its offensive missiles until they can out-number or elude our anti-missiles, launching the crazy spiral of an arms race...
...official rationale for a thin system--defense against China--is highly contestable. China now possesses no intercontinental missiles capable of attacking the United States. Yet the military proposes to build a system that Jerome Wiesner, John Kennedy's Science Advisor, believes would be almost immediately obsolete, and which can never be realistically tested because of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. ABM proponents further assume that China might use her first long-range missiles even before developing simple decoy devices, already known to the American military, that can render Sentinels almost useless. As a response China could only expect obliteration...
Lieutenant General Alfred D. Starbird, in recent testimony before the House Appropriations Committee, countered these arguments by telling startled Congressmen what they hadn't been told last year when they approved initial funds for the program: the Defense Department views the $5.5 billion system as only a first step in keeping up with an increasingly complex Chinese force. The final price tag is unknown...
...United States and Russia are on the verge of opening talks on curtailing he weapons race, and open-ended development of ABM's would upset the delicate balance of terror necessary for stability between the two nations. What Secretary McNamara most feared might very well happen: the ABM system could compel the Russians to respond...