Word: warheads
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...profile military figures neatly match the Kremlin's current diplomatic stance of a powerful but benign peacemaker. Yet there is far more to Soviet arms spending than appears in the budget. Funds for H-bombs and advanced weapons like multiple-warhead missiles are customarily tucked into budgets for "medium industry" and "scientific research." Additional allocations may well not be listed at all. Western analysts reckon that the true Soviet defense bill will come to about $60 billion in U.S. terms, or just about what the Pentagon spends now, excluding Viet Nam costs. Some speculate that, because of tension with...
...offender has to penetrate. If perfected by more testing, the MIRVs and the SS-9 could make an arms freeze technically impossible. Unlike ABMs, they are difficult to detect and restrict. The size and shape of MIRVed missiles would be indistinguishable from the size and shape of single warhead missiles...
Diverting Talent. The Lincoln Laboratory, for example, has developed a foliage-penetrating radar that detects Viet Cong hiding in the jungle. The Instrumentation Laboratory has designed a multiple-warhead guidance system for the Navy's Poseidon missile. Radical students, who staged a march at "I-lab" in April, insist that a university should totally shun research that is aimed at killing people. Moderate students and professors argue that the special labs' secrecy violates the academic principle of free inquiry, and more basically, that the growth of the special labs has diverted M.I.T. talent from domestic and social problems...
...distinction is important, because a crucial point in the argument is just how many deliverable H-bombs the U.S really needs to make retaliation a sufficiently convincing threat to the Russians. The "optimum" retaliatory force, according to former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, consists of 400 one-megaton warheads delivered to their assigned targets, destroying an estimated 30% of Russia's population and 76% of its industry. The U.S. now has 1,000 Minuteman and 54 Titan II ICBMs, each with a single warhead; 656 submarine-launched Polaris missiles, some of them already fitted with multiple warheads; and hundreds...
...would work at all-turns on the vulnerability of its radar guidance. Without it, Spartan and Sprint would journey blind. A nuclear blast outside the atmosphere can create radar blackouts lasting critical tens of seconds, as both U.S. and Soviet tests demonstrated in the early 1960s. A "precursor warhead," launched just ahead of a missile attack and detonated as a kind of nuclear smoke screen for the following ICBMs, could black out U.S. perimeter acquisition radar and disrupt the ABM defense...