Word: warhead
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Defense Robert McNamara were dubious about the prospects for a "surgical" strike limited to the missiles. If the U.S. wanted to "knock out" all Soviet weapons capable of hitting American soil from Cuba, said McNamara, it would have to bomb "airfields, plus the aircraft... plus all potential nuclear [warhead] storage sites." The President's brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, fretted that such extensive bombing would "kill an awful lot of people," in which case it would be "almost incumbent on the Russians" to threaten a strong counterblow, perhaps far from Cuba. Moreover, the secrecy necessary for successful military...
...against the Pershing II and cruise missiles, the peace movement uses a variety of arguments, some of them matters of legitimate debate, but some deeply flawed. Protesters charge, for instance, that Pershing IIs leave the Soviets vulnerable to a surprise, first-strike attack. Yet even if all 108 single-warhead Pershing IIs are deployed, they face 243 SS-20s with triple warheads in the European part of the U.S.S.R. Such a first strike on the part of NATO would make military sense only if it could wipe out Soviet retaliatory power completely, an impossible task even for U.S.-based intercontinental...
...worked closely with Wernher von Braun, the father of modern rocketry, to design the Nazis' V-2 rocket booster, then became a passionately loyal American cit izen after the German surrender. In the 1950s he worked on the Army's first missile capable of carrying and delivering a nuclear warhead, the Redstone...
...U.S.S.R. would have to reduce their overall nuclear arsenals by 45% by 1996. The key to the plan is a new unit of destructive power called Standard Weapons Station (SWS), which was developed by retired Air Force Lieut. General Glenn Kent. In its simplest form, an SWS represents a warhead atop a ballistic missile, a bomb on a plane, a self-propelled cruise missile. Kent's plan includes complex formulas so that oversize warheads count extra. So do multiple warheads that are clustered on top of missiles with particularly powerful lifting capability, known as "throw-weight." The details...
...have about 16,000 SWS's. To help it get down to 8,500 SWS's by 1996, the U.S. could replace its current 1,045 land-based missiles (2,565 SWS's) with 100 MX missiles (1,000 SWS's) and 500 single-warhead Midgetman missiles (another 500 SWS's). The Soviets could, if they wanted, keep 300 of their SS-18 missiles (6,150 SWS's) and fill the remainder of their quota with bombers and sea-launched missiles. But the goal is to penalize retention of such large weapons and move...