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The Sprint missile was the main weapon in the Nike-X system, intercepting enemy ICBM warheads only seconds before they exploded. Nike-X was an anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system designed in the 1960s by the United States Army to protect major cities in the United States from attacks by the Soviet Union's intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) fleet during the Cold War.
The Sprint was a two-stage, solid-fuel anti-ballistic missile (ABM), armed with a W66 enhanced-radiation thermonuclear warhead used by the United States Army during 1975–76. It was designed to intercept incoming reentry vehicles (RV) after they had descended below an altitude of about 60 kilometres (37 mi), where the thickening air stripped away any decoys or radar reflectors and exposed the ...
The Sprint missile was the main weapon in the Nike-X system, intercepting enemy ICBM warheads only seconds before they exploded. Nike-X was a proposed US Army anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system designed to protect major cities in the United States from attacks by the Soviet Union's ICBM fleet. The name referred to its experimental basis, it ...
When the same calculations were run for Nike-X, it was calculated that they would have to deploy 7,000 Sprint missiles, and the cost-exchange ratio was 20-to-1 in favor of the Soviets. When presented with these numbers, McNamara concluded that deploying Nike-X would prompt to Soviets to build more ICBMs, increasing the risk of an accidental war.
The following is a list of Nike missile sites operated by the United States Army.This article lists sites in the United States, most responsible to Army Air Defense Command; however, the Army also deployed Nike missiles to Europe as part of the NATO alliance, with sites being operated by both American and European military forces.
It happened at the Nike missile site at Fort Hancock, the U.S. Army base on the northern end of Sandy Hook. And Jackson’s task at that moment was to emergency-disarm the Hercules missiles that ...
One issue that became serious was the matter of site locations. Nike-X's Sprint missiles were so short ranged that several bases had to be built to cover the area of a large city. Sentinel relied mostly on the long range Spartan, so the missile sites could have been located at considerable distance from the cities.
In 1965, seven [24] HIBEX missiles were tested at WSMR, [25] and the first Sprint missile launch was at WSMR in November 1965. [26] Bell Telephone Laboratories [27] started the Multi-function Array Radar (MAR-I) construction at WSMR for Nike-X in March 1963. [28] MAR-1 was based on the ZAR, and was the basis for the Kwajalein Missile Site Radar.