Dense Pack

Dense Pack is a strategy for basing

ended.

MX basing debate

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The U.S. commitments under the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty prevented the development and construction of adequate ABM installations around its nuclear missile silos. Therefore, it was decided that new and unconventional strategies for protecting these military assets from a sneak-attack had to be developed.

The original concept had been to place the

, which could be launched from any direction, ended it as a useful concept.

In 1979, after a long debate on the topic, President Jimmy Carter selected the "multiple protective shelters" concept for basing the MX. In this system, the 200 MX missiles would be partnered with many thousands of silos, and the missiles would be periodically moved among the silos so the Soviets would not know where they were. In order to attack the MX fleet and do any significant damage, they would have to attack every silo. With enough silos, they would use up much of their warhead inventory to destroy only 200 missiles, a cost that was so high they would not contemplate it. Derided as the "racetrack" proposal, the primary problem was that it required huge tracts of land. It was immediately opposed in Nevada, and eventually fell out of favor in Utah.

Dense Pack

When

According to the Dense Pack strategy, a series of ten to twelve hardened silos would be grouped closely together in a line. This line of silos would generally run north-to-south, as the primary flight path for Soviet inbound nuclear missiles would be expected to come from the north over the North Pole. Each "super-hardened" silo would require an almost direct hit ground burst to destroy the missile within. When the first warhead went off, it would create a huge cloud of debris that was ejected thousands of feet into the sky. When the next warhead arrived it would hit this debris and be destroyed. Even if a warhead was successful in reaching the ground, it would create more dust and then lower the chance of the next one working.

This basic idea had been considered during the

fell back to the ground. In this case, however, it was Soviet warheads causing the fallout, which was politically acceptable.

The proposed Dense Pack initiative met with strong criticism in the media and in the government, dismissed as "duncepack" or "sixpack".^[3] Detractors of the Dense Pack strategy pointed out a number of flaws.

First, the advent of multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles, or

, negated the concept due to their ability to conduct a time-on-target barrage. Since all the warheads were arriving from a single missile, they could easily be launched to arrive within seconds of each other. In this case, the explosions would not yet have created the massive cloud of dirt, and they would all fall largely unimpeded.

Secondly, there were widespread doubts at the time that the hardened nature of the armored missile silos were as robust as the military claimed. If the silos could not survive a near-miss, then clustering the silos would allow a single warhead to destroy multiple silos, perhaps all of them. If the silos were not as hard as claimed, Dense Pack actually lowered their survival rate.

Finally, Dense Pack was perceived by some to be a provocative, if not overtly hostile measure at a time when

The U.S. Air Force reconsidered the use of the Dense Pack strategy in 1986, at least in part to find a way to add 50 additional missiles authorized by Congress only if a "safe" basing strategy could be found.[2] There is no evidence that the Dense Pack strategy was ever implemented.

References