Safeguard Program

The Safeguard Program was a U.S. Army anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system designed to protect the U.S. Air Force's Minuteman ICBM silos from attack, thus preserving the US's nuclear deterrent fleet. It was intended primarily to protect against the very small Chinese ICBM fleet, limited Soviet attacks and various other limited-launch scenarios. A full-scale attack by the Soviets would easily overwhelm it. It was designed to allow gradual upgrades to provide similar lightweight coverage over the entire United States over time.

Safeguard was the ultimate development of an ever-changing series of designs produced by Bell Labs that started in the 1950s with the LIM-49 Nike Zeus.^[1][2] By 1960 it was clear that Zeus offered almost no protection against a sophisticated attack using decoys. A new design emerged, Nike-X, with the ability to defend against attacks with hundreds of warheads and thousands of decoys, but the cost of the system was enormous. Looking for alternatives, the Sentinel program offered a lightweight cover that would protect against limited attacks. Sentinel began construction in 1968 but ran into a firestorm of protest over its bases being placed in suburban areas. In March 1969, incoming President Richard M. Nixon announced that Sentinel would be cancelled and redirected to protect the missile farms, and that its bases would be placed well away from any civilian areas.

The debate about ABM protection of US ICBMs had been going on for over a decade when Safeguard was announced, and the arguments against such a system were well known both in the military and civilian circles. In military circles, the most basic argument against Safeguard was that adding an ABM requires the Soviets to build another ICBM to counter it, but the same is true if the US builds another ICBM instead. The Air Force was far more interested in building more of their own ICBMs than Army ABMs, and lobbied against the Army continually. In the public sphere, opinion by the late 1960s was anti-military in general, and in an era of ongoing Strategic Arms Limitation Talks the entire concept was derided as sabre rattling. Safeguard had been developed to calm opposition but found itself just as heavily opposed. Nixon pressed ahead in spite of objections and complaints about limited performance, and the reasons for his strong support remains a subject of debate among historians and political commentators.

Through the Safeguard era, talks between the US and Soviet Union originally started by President Lyndon B. Johnson were continuing. The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972 limited the US and Soviet Union to two ABM sites each. Safeguard was scaled back to sites in North Dakota and Montana, abandoning initial work at a site in Missouri, and cancelling all other planned bases. Construction on the two remaining bases continued until 1974, when an additional agreement limited both countries to a single ABM site. The Montana site was abandoned with the main radar partially completed. The remaining base in North Dakota, the Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex, became active on 1 April 1975 and fully operational on 1 October 1975. By that time the House Appropriations Committee had already voted to deactivate it.^[3] The base was shut down on 10 February 1976.