You Might Want to Know - ICBMs Arriving - IX. False Start
False Start
The Russians were the first to test an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile successfully, in 1957, but almost from the time we got our first one, the Atlas D, in 1959, they had been way behind us in the number of ICBMs they had. We didn’t know it, but at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, they didn’t even have ten ICBMs. We had both the Atlas and the Titan I in operation by then, maybe a hundred missiles.
The Soviets had produced a lot of IRBMs, though, Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles. Range 1500 miles or so. That’s what they had sneaked into Cuba in 1962. From Cuba, those missiles would have been able to reach almost anywhere in the United States. We had developed IRBMs too, of course, the Thor and the Jupiter. In 1959, we’d set them up and put them on alert in England, Italy, and Turkey. From there, they could reach Moscow for sure.
Just as theirs in Cuba could have reached Washington, D. C.
The Soviets did take those IRBMs out of Cuba. But by 1969, the year I went to Laramie to live, they had caught up to us in number of ICBMs, with one-thousand fifty-three of their own. I hadn’t known this then, of course. They kept right on building them and in 1973 had reached their peak, close to one-thousand six-hundred. That was the year we got our one-thousand Minuteman III’s into service.
By 1988, the Soviets had come down a little from their 1973 peak but they still had several hundred more ICBMs than we did. By now their ICBMs could do everything ours could, maybe not quite as accurately, but close enough for government work, I bet. If we are talking about nuclear weapons.
They’d gotten ahead of us not just in numbers of ICBMs but maybe even in their “survivability.” They had developed the ability to move some of their missiles around on their roads and railroads. That reduced our chances of obliterating their ICBMs in the surprise attack we’d never do. Their cities weren’t mobile of course. Those we could still obliterate. Many many times over. Just as they could obliterate ours, if that’s what they felt was called for.
The Russians had also always been behind us in the total number of nuclear warheads in their stockpile. We had produced the very first atomic bombs, everybody knew that, in 1945. They had tested their first atomic bomb in 1949, when I was about to start third grade. They started out behind but by 1978, the year I became an associate professor at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, they finally caught up to and passed us in the total number of nuclear warheads they had. In 1978, we both had over twenty-five thousand of them. I didn’t know this either at the time.
We still might have had more of the very big warheads, we thought, the ones with yields in the megaton range, or at least in the hundreds of kilotons, the ones we called “strategic.” “City-busters” sometimes. Not quite the same thing, if that mattered.
The lower-yielding nuclear weapons we called “tactical” because we thought they might be used against soldiers on a battlefield. They had more of the tactical weapons, not surprisingly maybe, since they were surrounded by unfriendly neighbors, some also armed with nuclear weapons.
Some of these tactical weapons yielded quite a bit more than the Hiroshima bomb had. For those, it would have had to be a big battlefield off some place, wouldn’t it? Or you’d just have to not care about the civilians. As in Hiroshima.
President Reagan left office in 1989. Later that year, President George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev called an end to the Cold War. In 1991, the Soviet Union dissolved and now it really was “the Russians” and not “the Soviets.” In the next several years, we made treaties with the Russians that didn’t get rid of all ICBMs and other nuclear weapons, but did get rid of some of them.
In 1993, we started to reduce the number of Minuteman IIIs we had on alert. By 1997, we had cut the number in half and had ICBM wings in operation at only three bases, Malmstrom AFB in Montana, where the Minuteman had first gone on alert in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, at Minot AFB in North Dakota, where the first Minuteman IIIs had gone on alert in 1972, and at F.E. Warren in Cheyenne. F. E. Warren was also the headquarters of the 20th Air Force. The 20th Air Force would be in charge of all our ICBMs, even the ones at the other two missile fields. It still is. That worked out.
We’d started to get that MIRV problem in hand when our President George H. W. Bush agreed with the Russians in the Start II treaty that neither of us would put MIRVS on any of our land-based missiles any more. MIRVs were the Multiple Independently Targetable Re-entry Vehicles that allowed multiple warheads on one missile to be aimed at different targets. But then, in December 2001, his son, President George W. Bush, had declared we would withdraw from an Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that President Nixon had signed with the Soviets back in 1972. The Russians said if we did that, they would withdraw from the Start II agreement and MIRV their missiles again. That’s how you defeat any anti-ballistic missile system, it seemed clear. Just send over a bunch more nuclear warheads. They still had plenty.
President George W. Bush must have decided that MIRVs weren’t the worry we had thought they were. We’d spent a lot of money, a whole lot, billions and billions, on President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative that proposed to develop an impenetrable shield against ICBMs. It hadn’t produced any results, as far as I could see. Maybe President George W. Bush and his advisors still thought we would be able to figure out something that would provide us with a 100% defense against ICBMs. With nuclear weapons, it has to be 100%, doesn’t it. It’s not okay if just a few megaton-range warheads get through.
Or maybe the second Bush administration just hadn’t realized yet that the idea of missile defense against nuclear-armed ICBMs was a loser. Scientists like Hans Bethe had been arguing that since before President Nixon became president. President Nixon seems to have gotten it. He is who had signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty President George W. Bush had just withdrawn from. Maybe the President’s advisors, Dick Cheney seemed to be the big one, weren’t talking to the right people. Maybe the President hadn’t gotten the right advisors.
Anyway, suddenly, with the younger President Bush’s withdrawal from the ABM Treaty, we were going backward, it sure looked like to me.
Still, in 2002, even though Russia was now re-MIRVing its ICBMs because we had withdrawn from the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, President Bush decided we could get rid of the Peacekeepers that had been installed in that dense pack north of F. E. Warren. By 2005, they were gone.
Their warheads weren’t gone, however, those W87s in their highly accurate Mk 21 re-entry vehicles. We decided we would substitute the W87s for the W62s and W78s we had now on the Minuteman IIIs. We had needed over five hundred W87s for our fifty Peacekeepers. We now had four-hundred fifty Minuteman IIIs in service so the numbers were going to work out really well.
After this, for ICBMs we’d have only the four-hundred fifty Minuteman IIIs on alert.
We’d also have, however, our nuclear capable cruise missiles that could be launched from our ships, certain of our submarines, and our bombers, which also could carry the usual strategic nuclear bombs.
And the amazing Trident II D5 Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles I told you about earlier. The firepower on just one of those submarines could kill Russia, I bet.
If what you wanted was to be able to destroy those who had destroyed you, we had nothing to worry about.
Next: Down into the Heart of It