Word: tridents
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When it is christened Aug. 11 at Groton, Conn., the new Trident submarine U.S.S. Kentucky will have a bottle of bourbon rather than bubbly bashed across its bow. "We don't drink much champagne in Kentucky," says Congressman Larry Hopkins, a Republican from the state who sits on the House Armed Services Committee. To avoid offending any of the Kentucky distillers, Hopkins' wife Carolyn will break a bottle filled with a blend of bourbons from all the state's producers. The Navy professes no major qualms about this departure from tradition.Says a spokesman wryly: "The spirit's the thing...
...problem prompted computer studies of other warheads, which led to questions about the safety of a far more important weapon, the brand-new W-88 warhead carried by D-5 missiles fired by Trident II submarines. The D-5 is one of the principal weapons that would be launched at the Soviet Union in a nuclear war. Some scientists contend that the design of the third stage places too much rocket fuel too close to the warheads. Conceivably the fuel could ignite and detonate chemical explosives in the warhead while the missile was being handled in port, producing a potentially...
...which is heavier and thus decreases the range of a missile or artillery shell. By presidential order IHE nonetheless has been used in all new weapons built since 1985 -- with, however, at least one exception. Even after that date, defense planners decided not to switch to IHE in the Trident W-88 warhead. That is a design trade-off that the Pentagon may soon bitterly regret...
...Trident submarines, with their new, highly accurate eight-warhead D-5 missiles, should be considered the firmest leg of the nuclear triad, offsetting any vulnerability of the land-based ICBMs and the huge cost of ever more sophisticated bombers. Even William Webster, the CIA's cautious director, has said that the Soviet Union will be "unable, at least in this decade, to threaten U.S. subs in the open ocean." But no new Tridents are necessary for the remainder of the '90s, and the U.S. should immediately kill the rest of the procurement program. Saving: $1.4 billion...
...darken the waking hours of Western military and political leaders and the theoreticians who advise them. The Bush Administration remains committed to an expensive, redundant and provocative array of new strategic nuclear weapons -- the MX and Midgetman intercontinental missiles, the B-1 and B-2 (Stealth) bombers and the Trident II submarine-launched missile. These programs are monuments to old thinking. They are throwbacks to the days when the strategists accepted, as an article of their dark faith, the vulnerability of the U.S. to Kremlin crapshooters...