Word: warheaded
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...refused to give Ronald Reagan something the President had insisted, with all the persuasive flourishes of his best prime-time TV oratory, that America urgently needs to counter the Soviet Union's threatening nuclear arsenal: money to begin production of the 96-ton MX missile with its ten-warhead punch...
...strip 14 miles long and 1½ miles wide. Their concrete-and-steel silos would be hardened to a degree never before attained by engineers. The 100 holes would be spaced 1,800 ft. apart-a distance computed by Pentagon scientists as too great to permit a single Soviet warhead from knocking out more than one MX, but close enough so that the blasts from the first enemy warheads would disable those coming in behind. This Fratricide theory is untested and much debated among nuclear physicists (see box). If the theory is valid, more than half the MX missiles would...
...initial Soviet H-bombs would create powerful shock waves (throwing warhead guidance systems off course), searing temperatures (high enough on the periphery of the fireball to incinerate other warheads) and a flood of radiation (highenergy gamma and X rays, plus neutrons, which would wreck a warhead's electronics). The blast would also produce the deadly vacuum characteristic of all thermonuclear explosions, destroying almost all the atmosphere in an incoming warhead's path and effectively ending its maneuvering ability. Any warheads surviving these multiple perils would probably be burned up by frictional heat as they plunged earthward at more...
...Dense Pack may seem in the Pentagon's hard sell, many scientists believe it is fatally flawed. Says IBM Physicist Richard Garwin: "Fratricide may well be true, but it is irrelevant because it can be defeated." The Soviets, for example, could avoid Fratricide by dropping a single warhead at a time, beginning with the southern end of the Wyoming strip, at a rate of one every 20 to 40 sec. Strategists call such a barrage Slow Walk. The Pentagon says that the first detonations would leave so many particles in the atmosphere that the incoming warheads would still burn...
...powerful models-or "generations"-of missiles and honing their accuracy all the time. So there is certainly a need for the U.S. to modernize its deterrent. But it can do that without Dense Pack, leaving the job of attacking silos to the Trident II and the most accurate, multiple-warhead version of the Minuteman. Perhaps at some point in the future, a portion of those Minuteman missiles could be replaced by MXs-in existing silos, rather than in some elaborate "protective/deceptive" basing plan. That might be necessary if the Soviets have not, in the meantime, agreed to significant cutbacks...