Pershing II: Kevlar Motors, Moscow's Six-Minute Fear and the Heilbronn Fire

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In 1973 the U.S. Army set out to replace the Pershing 1A and its 400-kiloton warhead, and in 1975 Martin Marietta won the contract for the Pershing II, built for precision over raw yield. It carried the W85 warhead, adjustable from 5 to 80 kilotons; the earth-penetrating W86 was canceled in 1980. After the Soviets fielded the SS-20 Saber in 1976, NATO's 1979 double-track decision planned 464 ground-launched cruise missiles and 108 Pershing II launchers, and the missile's range grew to about 1,770 kilometers with a 30-meter circular error probable. Hercules wound the motors from Kevlar, and the maneuvering reentry vehicle paired a Singer Kearfott inertial system with a Goodyear Aerospace radar that matched live 128 by 128 pixel images against a stored 256 by 256 map.

Soviet planners believed the missile could fly 2,500 kilometers and still carried the W86, and feared a six-minute decapitation strike on Moscow that a Pershing II launched from West Germany could not actually reach. Launchers began arriving in late 1983, converted from Pershing 1A M790s into M1103s to stay within SALT II. Up to 500,000 protesters formed a human chain from the U.S. Army headquarters in Stuttgart to Wiley Barracks in Neu-Ulm. In January 1985 near Heilbronn, static electricity built up as a Kevlar motor was lifted off silicone foam pads, igniting the propellant and killing three soldiers of the 3rd Battalion, 84th Field Artillery. The 1987 INF Treaty eliminated the missiles by 1991, with motors burned out and crushed at the Longhorn Army Ammunition Plant in Texas.

• In October 1981, 300,000 demonstrators assembled in Bonn.
• Plowshares activists poured their own blood on missile components at a Martin Marietta facility in Florida.
• After Heilbronn, a moratorium lasted more than a year until new grounding procedures and ballistic covers were added.
• Scrap from Pershing IIs and SS-20s became Parker pens for five U.S. presidents in 1991 and Zurab Tsereteli's Good Defeats Evil sculpture at the UN.
• The W85 warheads were removed before destruction and rebuilt into B61 nuclear bombs.