Reagan's Rx for the MX

By Ed Magnuson

In a key arms address, the President proposes a controversial basing plan

His delivery was flawless, his tone somber, his message meant to be reassuring. "Our children should not grow up frightened," Ronald Reagan said. "They should not fear the future." But the President's approach to preventing nuclear war was of itself, and necessarily, a frightening thing: he urged deployment of 100 huge new MX intercontinental ballistics missiles in a Dense Pack cluster near Cheyenne, Wyo.

"It is sadly ironic," Reagan said, "that in these modern times it still takes weapons to prevent war. I wish it did not."

Reagan's decision on the MX amounted to a broad statement of Administration nuclear-weapons policy. Said he: "I intend to search for peace along two parallel paths--deterrence and arms reductions." Reagan described U.S. military vulnerabilities in the most sweeping terms he has used to date, declaring: "In virtually every measure of military power the Soviet Union enjoys a decided advantage." There is no certain deterrence against a possible Soviet attack in such a state of imbalance, he suggested, and no incentive for the Kremlin to agree to arms reductions. The Reagan policy, in short: to rearm America so that steps toward nuclear disarmament will become possible.

Whether the Administration can realize its goal of a vastly strengthened military depends largely on Congress. The decision to go ahead with the $26 billion MX system is certain to provoke stormy debate among the lawmakers, who are sensitive to growing public uneasiness about nuclear arms and the Administration's increased defense spending. The outcome of the argument, which may begin this week, could profoundly affect arms negotiations between the two superpowers, the economies of both nations, perhaps even the chances of a nuclear war.

To drive home his plea for the MX, and indirectly for more defense spending in general, Reagan used electronic graphs that showed--simplistically, and some experts say misleadingly--the red line of Soviet military might darting far beyond the U.S. blue. While the U.S. defense budget (in constant dollars) rose during the Viet Nam War, it dropped sharply to $116 billion in 1976, and has recovered to just $195 billion this year. Soviet defense funding, by contrast, increased steadily from $137 billion in 1962 to $275 billion in 1982. Two decades ago the U.S. had 3,090 strategic missiles and bombers, the U.S.S.R. a mere 510; now the Soviets have a lead, 2,498 to 1,918. More than 200 long-range Backfire bombers have joined Soviet strategic forces, while the U.S. still relies on its aging B-52 fleet. "Many of our B-52 bombers are now older than the pilots who fly them," Reagan noted.

Reagan belittled American nuclear weapons, arguing that "it's not right to ask our young men and women in uniform to maintain and operate such antiques." Therefore, he said, "we must replace and modernize our forces, and that's why I've decided to proceed with the production and deployment of the MX." He called it "the right missile at the right time." The four-stage, 71-ft.-tall missile is designed to carry ten nuclear warheads, each only 5 1/2 ft. long and 17 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The weapon is indeed a wonder of modern rocketry, but it is nothing the Soviets could not match.

Perhaps that is what the President had in mind when he asserted he might be willing to use the MX as a bargaining chip at the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks with the Soviets in Geneva. "What we are saying to them is this," Reagan explained. "We will modernize our military in order to keep the balance for peace, but wouldn't it be better if we both simply reduced our arsenals to a much lower level?" Reagan aides deny that he wants the MX primarily so he can trade it away, but they leaked his private pre-speech comment: "If we don't get the MX, we may as well bring our negotiators home from Geneva."

Many critics question Reagan's assertions of Soviet nuclear superiority, believe the disadvantages of MX deployment outweigh the benefits, and have grave doubts about the feasibility of the Dense Pack basing mode (see following stories). It is roughly the 30th option considered by the Air Force, which long favored the "racetrack" system supported in 1979 by President Carter. This involved shuttling 200 MX missiles on flatbed trailers among 4,600 shelters in Utah and Nevada. That $34 billion plan was buried under a barrage of environmental and political opposition, including that of Presidential Candidate Reagan in 1980.

Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, who favored the "big bird" scheme of putting the MX on continuously flying aircraft, last year urged that the MX be placed temporarily in specially hardened silos that now contain the Minuteman, the nation's dominant ICBM. The 1,000 Minutemen currently deployed carry a total of more than 2,100 warheads. Congress rejected that option on the ground that the MX would remain as vulnerable as the Minuteman is claimed to be, because new Soviet rockets are so accurate that a first strike could conceivably wipe the MX out. The lawmakers threatened to cut off further funding (some $4.5 billion has been spent on the missile to date) unless the Administration presented a permanent basing plan by Dec. 1 of this year. The Air Force was ordered to restudy its basing choices. Dense Pack was one of them. National Security Adviser William Clark backed it strongly, and Weinberger agreed to make it the Pentagon's preferred option. After studying a series of one-page memos on the subject, Reagan approved the Dense Pack idea in a 15-min. conversation with Clark last week.

The Dense Pack plan calls for the missiles to be implanted along a strip 14 miles long and 1 1/2 miles wide. Their concrete-and-steel silos would be hardened to a degree never before attained by engineers. The 100 holes would be spaced 1,800 ft. apart--a distance computed by Pentagon scientists as too great to permit a single Soviet warhead from knocking out more than one MX, but close enough so that the blasts from the first enemy warheads would disable those coming in behind. This Fratricide theory is untested and much debated among nuclear physicists (see box). If the theory is valid, more than half the MX missiles would survive an initial attack.

In a paper explaining his decision, Reagan conceded with great understatement that "deciding how to deploy the missile has not been easy." He described the Dense Pack plan only as "a reasonable way" to deter an attack. Theories on how the U.S.S.R. might find techniques to destroy the closely spaced MX missiles were dismissed as "technical dreams on which no Soviet planner or politician would bet the fate of his country."

Critics, of course, turn the argument around, contending that MX too is based on "technical dreams" and that even now, no responsible Soviet official could gamble on being able to destroy the U.S. Minuteman missiles with a first strike. Contends Paul Warlike, President Carter's chief arms negotiator: "The Soviets would have no certainty of carrying out such a strike using missiles they've never fired over a trajectory they've never tested."

Reagan seemed to signal his uncertainty about the invulnerability of the Dense Pack system. His paper warned that if the Soviet Union tries to challenge the MX with "more powerful and deadly weapons," the U.S. will be able to add more silos near the proposed Dense Pack field and move some of the 100 MX missiles into them, adding a shell-game kind of deception. "We would prefer that the Soviets dismantle SS-18s [which can carry either ten 1-megaton warheads or a single 25-megaton monster] rather than we build more holes," Reagan said. "But we can accommodate either." Weinberger had advised Reagan not to mention this option of deception, arguing that it would sound too much like Carter's racetrack. Even if expanded, however, Reagan insisted that the MX deployment would occupy only "a small land area."

The uncertainties about the MX and Dense Pack--whether either will work, whether the missile is a crucial need, a bargaining chip, or a weapon the Soviets will regard as a first-strike threat, in which case it will invite rather than deter attack--are all expected to be exploited by MX critics on Capitol Hill. With deficits soaring and budget cuts painful to pinpoint, the MX is a tempting target for legislators who read last month's elections as a mandate for defense cuts. The potentially bitter debate also follows recent victories at the polls by the nation's grass-roots nuclear-freeze movement, and the raising of moral questions about nuclear weapons by the U.S. Roman Catholic bishops, who specifically criticized the MX in a proposed pastoral letter.

The developing brawl could begin this week in the lameduck session of Congress. Either house can indefinitely delay the deployment of the missile by refusing to approve funds for the Dense Pack basing plan. A move in the House last July to cancel MX production failed to pass by a mere three votes. A similar measure in the Senate lost by just four. The Administration is expected to wage an all-out fight to gain funding in the lameduck session since the new House, with 26 more Democrats than the present body, is expected to be even less receptive to the Administration's military spending plans.

The House Appropriations Committee is expected to take up the MX basing scheme this week. A subcommittee headed by New York Democrat Joseph Addabbo, a sharp MX critic, voted 7 to 6 to recommend spending $998 million to acquire five of the missiles. Addabbo will now fight to block those funds in the full committee. He argues that the $2.7 billion the Administration is seeking for further research and development shows how much technical work needs to be done on the MX before Congress funds its production. The committee seems virtually deadlocked on the issue. "I think it will be beat, not in committee but on the floor," predicts a key House Republican leader. Insists Massachusetts Democrat Nicholas Mavroules: "Time has run out for MX. The House will not gamble with billions to deploy a system of marginal capability and questionable survivability."

Chances of survival for MX production funds are not much better in the Republican-controlled Senate. "It's going to be very, very close," predicts one Senate insider. Texas Republican John Tower, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has praised Reagan for a "courageous" decision on the MX but has declined so far to endorse the basing mode. Opposition to Dense Pack is being led by South Carolina Democrat Ernest Rollings, an influential military hawk, who argues that "the Soviets would love nothing more than to see us throw away billions of dollars on a system that could be easily countered."

Even if Dense Pack is defeated, however, there is no dominant sentiment in Congress for killing the missile outright. The research and development funds enjoy general support, if only as a way to keep some pressure on Soviet negotiators at the Geneva talks. "There's only one argument for the MX--the bargaining chip," says a key Republican leader. "You've got to have MX to go to the table with the Russians."

One of the most devastating pieces of ammunition against Dense Pack basing is a letter that has not been made public. California Nobel Physicist Charles Townes, head of a blue-ribbon commission that has reviewed MX deployment plans for the Pentagon, is known to have questioned the feasibility of hardening silos sufficiently to protect closely spaced MX missiles. In a letter transmitting the group's findings on the Fratricide concept, Townes expressed qualified approval for the Dense Pack option but warned it might not take long for Soviet planners to foil this technique. In fact, one Pentagon team assigned to make a "devil's advocate" study predicted such countertactics could be ready about the time Dense Pack is fully operational in 1989. Nonetheless, insists Weinberger, the MX in Dense Pack "is the only way in which the arms-control objectives of the President can be attained. The whole point of getting it is to make sure we don't have to use it."

The President's decisions produced a predictably angry reaction from Moscow. Speaking through the Communist Party newspaper Pravda, the new Soviet leadership denounced the MX plan as a violation of both SALT I and the unratified SALT II agreements, which it said involved "an obligation not to create additional silos for intercontinental missiles." Added the unsigned article: "Washington must also be aware that this step will not promote progress at the negotiations in Geneva." Major U.S. allies in NATO tended to support the MX decision. Sharply rebuffing leftist criticism of the plan in the British Parliament, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher declared: "It is not for us to tell the United States what to do. It is for us to recognize that their strategic nuclear force is the final guarantor of European liberty."

Out in the high prairie country of southeast Wyoming, snow last week covered the gentle hills where the MX is supposed to go. Come spring, cattle and sheep will be grazing on the nearly treeless windswept land, where wheat and beans are also grown. The brown topsoil and the underlying dry, loose sandy earth make the region ideal for the deep MX silos. Residents are sharply divided. Many have made their peace with the Minuteman silos that dot their land. They have also enjoyed the business generated by nearby Warren Air Force Base, which is the proposed headquarters for the Dense Pack installation. (Its population could increase from 5,000 to 7,000 as a result.) The Air Force estimates that at least 3,500 workers would be employed in the six years of construction. Local businessmen place the economic benefit to the community at as much as $70 million a year.

"Missiles are nothing new to this area," notes Cheyenne Lawyer Byron Hirst. "It's just like having another blackjack table in Las Vegas." Other residents are worried, however, that the silo field will be expanded once the MX missiles get a foothold, with unknown impact on scarce water supplies and the area's bucolic way of life. Viewing the selection of his state for MX as a mixed blessing, Wyoming Governor Ed Herschler, a Democrat, quipped: "It's like a teen-age daughter coming home at 3 a.m. with a Gideon Bible under her arm."

From the Kremlin to the White House to the Pentagon to landowners near Cheyenne, everyone interested in Dense Pack is now watching Capitol Hill. Unfolding there is what may become one of the most significant defense policy debates of the 1980s.

--By Ed Magnuson. Reported by Neil MacNeil and Christopher Redman/Washington, with other bureaus

With reporting by Neil MacNeiland, Christopher Redman/ Washington, other bureaus

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