Word: warhead
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Wars almost certainly cannot work. Former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger characterizes the headier versions of a Star Wars plan as "half Buck Rogers, half P.T. Barnum," and even the most ardent proponents generally con- cede that no technology now known or foreseeable could be guaranteed to destroy every warhead the Soviets could launch. Some percentage would always get through, causing death and devastation beyond the mind...
...Star Wars system work in this more limited sense? It will take a long time to find out: though a fairly crude defense could be erected by the early 1990s, some of the more advanced warhead-killing technologies, like lasers and particle beams, seem to be at least 15 to 20 years away from effective use. The obstacles are difficult even to conceive, let alone overcome. One example: tracking enemy missiles, aiming and firing at them, and then assessing almost instantaneously which ones have been hit would require a computer program so complex that it is beyond the ability...
...Star Wars in the same general forum with offensive weapons. If it could not hold Star Wars off the table entirely, Washington had wanted to keep talks on offensive and defensive systems separate. Its hope was to conclude a pact that would sharply reduce the numbers of missiles and warheads without agreeing to any limit on the Star Wars program. But even if the Soviets should agree to deep cuts in offensive weapons, the formula worked out at Geneva gives them a chance to demand that defensive systems also be limited before a single missile is actually dismantled...
...experts believe that the Soviet cruise was on a training mission and was probably not armed with either a nuclear or a conventional warhead. They also concluded that the missile was most likely an old model that Moscow had had in its naval arsenal for more than 20 years, rather than a test version of the SS-NX-21, a long-range (2,000-mile) weapon that the Soviets are developing to compete with the American Tomahawk, a missile that has had several errant flights of its own. Nonetheless, the mishap pointed up the dangers of such weapons, whether nuclear...
...weaponry: conventional and nuclear, battle-field range and globe-spanning, tanks, aircraft, surface ships, submarines, and most of all, rockets." We are told that SALT I and II tended to codify the trends in each side's weapon inventory--for the Soviets' development of heavy, land-based, multiple warhead intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs): for the U.S., reliance on a strategic "triad" of ICBMs, submarine-launched missiles, and intercontinental bombers. Talbott acknowledges the relative danger involved in the Soviet choice of arsenal, which is easily targetable and therefore might predispose them toward a policy of "launch first, ask questions later...