Smoke Screens and Window Shades

When former President Jimmy Carter first proposed the MX missile system in 1979, it consisted of 200 missiles with ten warheads each that would be shuttled among several hundred shelters along a huge racetrack in the Utah desert. The claim was that a mobile system was needed to close the recently discovered "window of vulnerability" on U.S. land-based missiles. The plan fell victim to its enormous financial and ecological costs, and to the reluctance of Utahans to become the target for the brunt of any possible Soviet attack.

The racetrack shell game was followed by a succession of bizarre, and ultimately rejected, proposals that included placing the missiles on submarines that would wander endlessly up and down our coasts, keeping them in perpetually aloft airplanes, and finally Reagan's dense pack scheme that Congress rejected last year. If nothing else, the MX became one of the richest sources of political satire since the Nixon administration.

Finally after the dense pack debacle, Reagan appointed a special commission to evaluate U.S. strategic policy, specifically to make a final, once-and-for-all recommendation about the MX. The president indicated the gravity he attached to the issue by the make-up of the 11-member commission. It included John McCone, James Schlesinger, Alexander Haig, and Henry Kissinger himself, as well as several other former secretaries of defense.

As would be expected, the commission recommended the deployment of a scaled-down version of the MX program. But in their desperation to save the MX, these Brahmins of the defense and foreign policy establishment implicitly admitted that the very arguments many of them had previously made for the MX were actually fraudulent. With the commission's decision to base the MX in existing Minuteman missile silos, the old window of vulnerability officially joins the notorious missile gap of 1960 in the museum of great nuclear hoaxes.

If the old problem was that the vulnerability of Minuteman missiles to Soviet attack crippled the U.S. deterrent force, then putting the MX in the same holes is hardly a solution. While nearly admitting to the press that the whole vulnerability theory was bogus, the commissioners nonetheless made a polite nod to it with their proposal for a new generation of smaller, mobile "Midget-man" missiles for the 1990s. But the Midgetman idea only strengthens the pragmatic argument against the MX. If plans go ahead for Midgetman, the MX will only be in potential use for about five years: not much return on a minimum investment of $15 billion.

What justification is left, then, for the MX? According to the president's men it has become a test of U.S. will. We have to make some grand gesture to show the Soviets we are tough, and the MX is as good a gesture as any. The other argument is that we need the MX as a bargaining chip for future negotiations with the Soviets. This argument has been used repeatedly for weapons systems that were later considered non-negotiable when we actually got to the table. The most drastic example was the placement of multiple warheads (MIRVs) on most U.S. missiles in the early 1970s. The MIRV program was sold to Congress solely as a bargaining chip for SALT I. But the treaty that resulted simply gave the go-ahead for MIRVs on both sides.

The "test of will" and "bargaining chip" arguments are less obviously deceptive than the window of vulnerability, and they are more likely to win over politicians in Congress. But they are still a strategic smoke screen for the MX's real purpose. Along with the Pershing II, cruise, and Trident II missiles, the MX is part of the Pentagon's overall design to attain a clear, nuclear first-strike capability. Our defense planners hope that with these weapons, the United States could threaten and perhaps execute a nuclear attack that would leave the USSR unable to retaliate. The Pentagon wants nothing less than to be able to fight and win a nuclear war.

This would be accomplished, they say, by having enough missiles of sufficient power and accuracy to knock out the Soviet arsenal while it is still in the ground. This, of course, multiplies the potential for war by Soviet initiative by presenting a situation where the only Soviet defense is to fire first in a potential crisis. The danger is heightened by the fact that some high U.S. military officials, still believing that the silo-bound MX will be dangerously vulnerable, are increasing pressure for a U.S. policy to launch our missiles at the computer warning of an attack rather than in response to an actual nuclear assault. It is this destabilizing effect of the MX that should be the reason for rejecting it, not just the fact that it is outrageously expensive or that the basing modes are either silly or illogical.

Congress will be voting on the MX in the next few months. If it is approved, which seems likely but not certain at this point, we will turn another page in a dangerous, new chapter of the arms race. The task of stopping and reversing that race will become all the more urgent, but a great deal more difficult.