Word: warheads
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Fully half of the Lab's $385 million appropriation is spent on weapons development, and the nocturnal thuds of high explosives testing tend to be reassuring rather than disruptive of sleep. Nuclear devices designed at the Lab end up as the heart of MIRV warheads in Minuteman missiles. The new Trident missile will carry a nuclear warhead designed at the Lab. Theoreticians and physicists specializing in thermodynamics are drilling holes into nearby sites to reach "hot rocks" that will provide geothermal power. A special reverence is held for LAMPF, the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility. There...
...disadvantages of each of these items in terms of accuracy, payload, cost and political implications. Clearly, the Pershing II and cruises were the best solution to the new realities. Furthermore, neither was an entirely new system. Neither could be portrayed as a "terror" weapon like the ill-fated neutron warhead, which in the spring of 1978 had alarmed public opinion in Western Europe to the point where NATO governments hesitated about its deployment and President Carter decided to postpone the project...
Moscow's drive has already assumed the proportions of its campaign in 1977 and early 1978 against the proposed deployment of the neutron warhead. Under withering pressure from leftists and peace activists, Western Europeans resisted the idea, and President Carter eventually decided to abandon it. The stakes are higher in the current proposal: to modernize NATO's theater nuclear forces with the deployment of 572 mobile, intermediate-range cruise and Pershing II missiles in Western European countries, as a counterforce to the more than 100 advanced multiwarhead SS-20 missiles already stationed in the western Soviet Union...
...from hitting the Soviet Union from the U.S., the Pershing II is not, strictly speaking, a strategic weapon. But since it could strike Russia from bases in Western Europe, it is something considerably more than a tactical, battlefield nuclear device like the atomic cannon or the proposed neutron warhead...
Each shelter would have a device that could push a missile through its ceiling and raise it to a 50° firing angle. Spaced at about 6,000-ft. intervals, the shelters would be far enough apart so that a Soviet warhead that destroyed one of them probably would be too far away to seriously damage another. To be certain of knocking out 200 MX missiles, therefore, the Kremlin would have to fire warheads at all 4,600 shelters, which would so strain the capability of its arsenal that it would have few warheads left for anything else...