MX Missile 1st Silo Launch: Peacekeeper 1985 US Air Force Ballistic Missile Office

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Originally a public domain film, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-118_Peacekeeper

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The LGM-118 Peacekeeper, also known as the MX missile (for Missile-eXperimental), was a land-based ICBM deployed by the United States starting in 1986. The Peacekeeper was a MIRV missile that could carry up to 10 re-entry vehicles, each armed with a 300-kiloton W87 warhead in a Mk.21 reentry vehicle (RV). A total of 50 missiles were deployed starting in 1986, after a long and contentious development program that traced its roots into the 1960s.

MX was designed to allow the US to ride out a sneak attack by the Soviet ICBM fleet and then launch a counterattack. In order for the counterattack to be effective, MX had to have three qualities: the ability to be rapidly re-targeted, so that it would attack only those Soviet missiles known to be in their silos; enough accuracy to allow a small warhead to kill an enemy silo, so that more warheads could be packed on a single MX missile; and a basing system that meant enough of the missiles would survive an attack that the counterattack would be effective. Among these three, the basing issue remained an unsolved problem and the subject of much criticism during the MX's development.

After considerable debate, President Ronald Reagan announced that the newly named Peacekeeper would be put into service in existing LGM-30 Minuteman silos, a temporary solution until a final basing solution was decided. During the same period, the United States and the Soviet Union were involved in negotiations on the START II treaty, under which ICBMs were allowed to carry only a single warhead each. Because the Minuteman could carry a single warhead for far less money the United States agreed to remove the Peacekeeper from their nuclear force in this treaty. Although START II was not ratified by the United States, the missiles were removed, with the last one going out of service on 19 September 2005. Their advanced W87 warheads were moved to Minuteman III.

The private launch firm Orbital Sciences Corporation has developed the Minotaur IV, a four-stage civilian expendable launch system using old Peacekeeper components...

The Air Force had depended on engineering support from TRW during the early days of the development of their ICBM force. In 1960 a number of TRW and other engineers involved in the ICBM program formed The Aerospace Corporation, initially working on the Mercury spacecraft, X-20 Dynasoar and various ICBM projects. In 1964, the Air Force contracted them to consider a wide variety of survivable ICBM solutions, under the name "Golden Arrow".

The project considered road, rail, submarine and air-launched weapons...

In 1976, Congress refused to fund MX using a silo-based system on grounds of vulnerability, and the project was halted. Several new proposals were made for alternate basing arrangements, including mobile basing in railway cars that would be sent out into the nation's rail network during times of heightened threat levels, and more complex systems of deeply buried silos under mesas that would include systems to quickly dig themselves out after an attack.

Eventually, the program was reinstated in 1979 by President Carter, who authorized deployment of 200 missiles throughout eastern Nevada and western Utah. The deployment would occur in a system of multiple protective shelters linked by underground or aboveground roads, the so-called "Racetrack" proposal...

Reagan canceled the new shelter system in 1981, calling it "a Rube Goldberg scheme". He proposed deploying an initial force of missiles in the approximately 60 existing Titan II silos, removing those now outdated missiles from service. The silos would be modified for much greater strength, and a number of Minuteman III silos similarly adapted over time to bring the force to a total of 100 missiles...