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Romney's Hit Piece on START: 'Thoroughly Ignorant'

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Shiplord Kirel: From behind wingnut lines7/07/2010 12:29:06 pm PDT

I agree with the gist of this critique but this paragraph is misleading at best:

ICBMs are not “mounted on,” or loaded inside, bombers. The only nuclear weapons carried by bombers are bombs; that’s why they’re called bombers. (Many years ago, some B-52s and B-1s were equipped with air-launched cruise missiles, which flew through the atmosphere, as opposed to intercontinental ballistic missiles, which arc outside the atmosphere. These ALCMs are almost completely phased out, in any case.) Certainly bombers are incapable of carrying MIRVs (which, by the way, are “multiple warheads” loaded onto the tips of missiles).

This is not a matter of definition but of technology. There are currently no ICBMs that can be launched from aircraft but it is by no means an impossibility and the concept has been thoroughly explored in the past.

MX background at Global Security:

One approach to mobility was an air-mobile system, and during a 24 October 1974 test of the concept, SAMSO successfully launched a Minuteman I from a C-5A cargo aircraft
.

GAM-87 Skybolt

The Douglas GAM-87 Skybolt was an air-launched ballistic missile that would have been carried on the B-52H. Armed with a W59 nuclear warhead in a Mk. 7 re-entry vehicle, development was initiated in the late 1950s. The decision to proceed with the Skybolt was made in February 1960, with initial deployment projected for 1964. In June of 1960, the British government ordered 100 Skybolts to be carried by the Avro Vulcan. However, in December of 1962, President Kennedy cancelled the Skybolt missile for political and economical reasons.

Technically, the Skybolt was an MRBM (medium range ballistic missile) with a range of 1150 miles rather than an ICBM, and the technology was very challenging at the time. Even so, many experts, citing the final and successful test launch, contend to this day that it could have been made workable and that the cancellation was based largely on politics. That a system designed 50 years ago worked as well as it did is a good indication that the concept would be wholly practical today, and on a much larger scale.