You Might Want to Know - ICBMs Arriving - IV. We Weren't Done Yet
IV. We Weren’t Done Yet
Even before the Vietnam War was over, over for us, anyway, even before we had put on alert all our Minuteman IIIs with three MIRVed warheads on them, we learned that the Soviets had developed an ICBM that could carry ten MIRVs, maybe more.
All right, then. In 1972, our Air Force had started to work on a bigger MIRVed missile of our own, called the MX, for “missile experimental.” It would have four stages, not just the three of the Minuteman or the two of the Titan or the single stage of the Atlas.
We’d be able to get the MX in operation eventually, not much question about that in my mind. The tough question was where to base the MX and how to base it so that the missiles couldn’t all be destroyed by, say, one or two or three of their heavy SS-18s with ten MIRVs on each missile. Three of those could take care of any of our Minuteman missile fields, or might well, even if the silos were in an area three times the size of Delaware, as they were at F. E. Warren.
President Carter, who had given the okay to build the MX, considered the options our nuclear strategists told him we had for basing the missiles. He decided the way to go would be to put them on railcars in a great big underground network that would be built out in Utah and Nevada, in the empty west . Not really empty, of course, but emptier than some other parts of the country.
The network would cover an area much much larger than any of our Minuteman fields. It would have more than four thousand launching sites in it.
When it came to being given missile fields, and all the money that would be spent on them, Utah and Nevada had been left out so far. This would take care of that. Oregon had been left out too of almost all our military expenditures for some reason. Every other state out west had in it something important and expensive to do with nuclear weapons. Oregon hadn’t gotten anything out of the deal.
For the moment, though, it was just the one thousand Minuteman III ICBMs, many MIRVed now. While we were working on the new MX missile, our weapons laboratory at Los Alamos developed a new warhead for the Minuteman III that was better than the W62 that had been designed by the Radiation Lab at Berkeley. The new W78 would weigh about the same as the W62 but would have a better re-entry vehicle and yield 335-350 kilotons, more than twenty Hiroshimas, twice what the W62 yielded.
In 1982, Ronald Reagan was elected President. He said he thought Carter’s underground railcar idea was dumb. Instead, he said, we should put the missiles in a “dense pack” of silos that would be “super-hardened.” Our Minuteman III silos had been “hardened,” but these new silos would be “super-hardened.” Would this mean they would be able to withstand the blast of the twenty megaton warheads the SS-18 could deliver? Or even the blast of a five megaton warhead if it were pretty accurate?
To do that, we thought the silos would have to be able to withstand a pressure of sixty- to seventy-thousand pounds per square inch. Twenty pounds per square inch was what we had found would destroy or badly damage heavy concrete structures on the surface and kill 100% of any unprotected people. I guess some people thought we might be able to build something that would withstand a pressure three thousand times greater than that, I’m not exactly sure how.
The main idea of the “dense pack” was that if several SS-18s came in at the same time in an attack on it, the warheads would blow each other up before they all could detonate. “Fratricide” it was called. Some people in Congress thought this was also a dumb idea. All the Russians would have to do was have the SS-18s come in at brief intervals. The critics of the Reagan plan called it “dunce pack.”
Congress didn’t seem to be convinced that the dense pack plan would work but it sure would be cheaper than building an underground network for railcars that would be dug across large parts of the wide open spaces in Utah and Nevada. Also, if we used the dense pack idea, we might be able to re-do some existing silos and get the new missiles ready to go faster.
Congress then said they would pay for only fifty, not the one- or two-hundred of the new MX missiles that President Reagan had asked for.
The first normal name that was thought of for the new MX missiles was “Peacemakers.” But someone realized that that wouldn’t be a good name for this missile because the whole idea of missiles with nuclear warheads on them was not that they would make peace after a nuclear war had started, not the kind of peace anyone would want, anyway. It was that they might keep the other side from starting a war. Deterrence, this was called. It’s a theory some had. A faith, you could say. Not something you could ever prove worked.
We Americans would never be the ones to start a nuclear war, we all knew that, even though we couldn’t say so officially because that might tempt somebody on the other side to try a first strike on us. The other side wasn’t so sure we wouldn’t attack them first, just as we weren’t sure they wouldn’t attack us first. By “the other side,” I mean the Soviets.
President Reagan decided to call the MX the “Peacekeeper” instead.
The dense pack of Peacekeepers would be installed either at F.E. Warren in Cheyenne, using some of the silos we were now using for the Minutemen, or at Davis-Monthan back in Tucson, where we had deployed the Titan IIs. I say “had” because in 1981, President Reagan had decided to retire the Titan IIs. Those storable propellants in the Titan IIs were poisonous and unstable and we’d had some accidents with them that had killed people in the silos. In one of the accidents, a silo in Arkansas had exploded. The explosion threw the nine-megaton W53 on the missile that had twice the explosive power of all the explosives used by all sides in World War II across the road. It took a while to find it. It hadn’t detonated.
Should this accident and the fact that the W53 hadn’t detonated make us more or less worried about an accidental nuclear detonation? I couldn’t say. In any case, President Reagan had later decided to take the Titan II’s off alert. The W53s would be retired.
When we took the fifty-three Titan IIs out of action, we’d lose four hundred seventy-seven megatons of yield, the equivalent of over ninety-five World War IIs. But after we got the fifty new Peacekeepers in service, we wouldn’t have lost much ground. The new warhead we would have for the Peacekeeper--in 1984 we hadn’t actually started manufacturing yet--was the W87. Each W87 would weigh about five hundred pounds and in the new re-entry vehicle we were designing for it, the Mk 21, would weigh only eight hundred pounds. Ten of these W87s would weigh eight thousand pounds. Less than Little Boy had weighed.
The yield of each W87 was going to be three hundred kilotons, twenty Hiroshimas, but it would be upgradable to four hundred seventy-five kilotons, over thirty Hiroshimas. Remember, each Peacekeeper would be carrying ten of them, and each re-entry vehicle would have a CEP of under four hundred feet, a little over one football field. So the Peacekeeper might be carrying fewer warheads than the Soviets’ SS-18, but it would certainly be nothing to sneeze at.
Finally, F. E. Warren, just over the hill from me, was chosen as the place to install the dense pack of Peacekeepers. We would modify some Minuteman III silos for them and actually build the Peacekeepers inside the silos.
Wyoming’s Senator, Malcolm Wallop, was very much in favor of having the Peacekeepers in Wyoming at F.E. Warren. He said it would save lives. I didn’t know about that, but it would help the Cheyenne’s economy, no doubt about that. Our taxpayer funded military expenditures were helping a lot of local economies. Except Oregon’s.
A lot of people would be awfully disappointed if we stopped spending all that taxpayer money, wouldn’t they? Does that mean we can never stop?
Next: What were the things they carried?