The Brandywine Peace Community began a vigil at the General Electric (GE) Plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, in the late 1970s. One of Brandywine's members, Bob Smith, initiated the vigil when he learned that GE was making first-strike nuclear weapons at this facility near Philadelphia. Publicly, the Pentagon espoused a policy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). This strategy dictated that the United States must keep pace with or ahead of the Soviet Union's expanding military capacities to maintain a threat of reciprocal annihilation that would deter a Soviet attack. In reality, the United States had shifted from deterrence toward a first-strike strategy whereby a new generation of extremely powerful nuclear weapons could decimate an enemy's military bases, destroying its ability to retaliate.

This new policy produced dramatic innovations in weapons technology. To be effective, the first-strike strategy requires the obliteration of all enemy military targets: command posts, strategic air bases, nuclear storage depots, communication centers, and so forth. But driven by the arms race, the Soviets had massively expanded their military facilities. To efficiently demolish this growing number of targets, the Pentagon initiated the development of multiple individually targeted reentry vehicles (MIRVs). As Robert Aldridge noted, “MIRVs changed the concept of one missile destroying one target to one missile being able to destroy many targets. Many MIRVs can be put on one missile so that more targets can be destroyed without increasing the number of missiles.”