THE DAMAGE NUTS CAN DO

is well known from the Tylenol case in Chicago, but here is another example: This writer knows of a case when a worker on top of a 300 ft radio mast dropped a (hexagonal) nut which hit a fellow worker on the ground. It went clean through his shoulder and exited at his armpit like a bullet. There is, in fact, nothing dangerous about a bullet other than its velocity.

The other fundamental reason why Dense Pack is deadly for Soviet warheads but allows US missiles to be launched is that soft warheads are coming in, but hard missiles going out. The hard nose cone and the rest of the outer missile shell travels to the target region, where it enters the atmosphere, protecting its vulnerable cargo from the re-entry heat (velocity, again, makes a sparse atmosphere rub the hardened metal into red-hot heat). Then the nose cone opens and lets out the vulnerable warheads, which are in no shape to run full speed into the debris of their predecessors. In contrast, the US missiles would go through that debris not only more slowly, but protected by the hard nose cone and outer shell (shroud).

If you re-read the two fundamental points why incoming, but not outgoing, missiles are destroyed, you will see that the terms Soviet and US have nothing to do with technological maturity or any other national aspect; the words can simply be replaced by "aggressor" and "defender." Like the neutron bomb, Dense Pack is a purely defensive system whose expense and complexity would make no sense whatever if it were to be used for aggression. It is therefore being attacked with the same frenzied viciousness as the neutron bomb was. Typically, Union of "Concerned" "Scientists" head Henry Kendall, whose integrity and competence is well known to readers from the field of nuclear power, immediately labeled it "a first strike weapon."