Dense Pack Gets Blasted

By Ed Magnuson.

Dense Pack Gets Blasted In a rebuke to Reagan, the House says no to the complex MX basing system

The House is Washington's home for hawks. What the Pentagon wants, the House normally gives it--and sometimes more. But last week, by a surprisingly decisive margin of 69 votes, the House refused to give Ronald Reagan something the President had insisted, with all the persuasive flourishes of his best prime-time TV oratory, that America urgently needs to counter the Soviet Union's threatening nuclear arsenal: money to begin production of the 96-ton MX missile with its ten-warhead punch.

The stunning rejection of a President's wishes on a major national security issue drew an uncharacteristically bitter reaction from Reagan. "I had hoped that most of the members in the House had awakened to the threat facing the United States," he said. "That hope was apparently unfounded. A majority chose to go sleepwalking into the future."

Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger warned the Senate Armed Services Committee that if the Senate too blocks MX production funds, the U.S. would be "telling the world we are disarming unilaterally." Edward Rowny, the chief U.S. negotiator in the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks with the Soviet Union in Geneva, predicted that without the MX, the U.S. will find it "extremely difficult" to achieve a START agreement. Secretary of State George Shultz, attending NATO and trade meetings in Brussels, struggled to convince the allies that resistance to the MX in the U.S. is not quite the same as resistance in some Western European nations to positioning nuclear-tipped Pershing II and cruise missiles on their soil as scheduled for next year. "We have 1,000 long-range land-based Minutemen throughout the West," Shultz emphasized. The MX, he said, is just "a modernization of that system."

The Administration stumbled on the MX missile's most glaring weakness: after more than eight years of study, the expenditure of $4.5 billion on the missile and consideration of some 30 options, the Pentagon still lacks a politically acceptable and scientifically credible basing mode for its sophisticated bird. Reagan, Weinberger and a flurry of military papers and briefings had all failed in the rush to sell Dense Pack, the basing plan that would plant 100 of the 71-ft.-tall missiles in a 21-sq.-mi. strip of Wyoming, 14 miles long by 1.5 miles wide. Proponents argued that because the missiles would be clustered so closely, incoming Soviet rockets theoretically would destroy one another, and superhardened silos would protect most of the MX missiles from destruction. The survivors would then rise to retaliate, knocking out any Soviet intercontinental missiles still in their silos.

Technically, the House did not vote on Dense Pack. It only eliminated $988 million sought by the Administration to produce the first five of the 226 MX missiles it wants to acquire in a program that would cost at least $30 billion. In fact, the House readily approved spending $2.5 billion for continued research and development of the MX and its basing system, presumably something other than Dense Pack. The House did not reject Reagan's basic argument that the 1,000 Minutemen are vulnerable to a first strike from improved Soviet ICBMs and that the MX is needed, in some form, to counter that threat. But in effect the House was saying no to Dense Pack when it killed the production funds.

New York's Democratic Congressman Joseph Addabbo, 57, an obscure and almost shy eleven-term Representative from Queens, led the fight against MX production. He had heard Air Force officers briefing House members on Dense Pack. "That went over like a lead balloon," he recalled later. "The more they tried to explain Dense Pack, the less the members knew." Addabbo had also heard that not even the Joint Chiefs of Staff were wholly behind Dense Pack.

On the day of the vote, Reagan summoned 76 Congressmen to the White House for a sales pitch from himself, Vice President George Bush and Weinberger. The President warned against turning the imminent Dec. 7 vote into another Pearl Harbor. Still, his enthusiasm for Dense Pack was far from contagious. He called it "the option with the least warts." Weinberger worked the telephones hard, pressing Congressmen to support all of the MX funding. He called one Representative three times, finally getting an impatient reply: "I'm a no vote. If I changemy mind, I'll call you."

On Capitol Hill, Addabbo got strong help in rounding up anti-production votes from Washington Democrat Norman Dicks. Several Republicans who did not want to be lobbied by Reagan told Dicks, "I'm probably going to vote with you, but don't tell the White House." Despite the heat, Mississippi Republican Trent Lott, working with Minority Leader Robert Michel of Illinois to support Reagan's position, concluded that the President would lose. He gave White House aides the news so that Reagan could withdraw from an all-out fight, perhaps by agreeing to reconsider the basing mode, and avoid a repudiation. Reagan refused.

During the debate, anti-Dense Pack Congressmen had a field day ridiculing the unproven "fratricide" and silo-hardening theories. "Pearl Harbor was the original Dense Pack," said California Democrat John Burton, reversing Reagan's argument. Iowa Republican James Leach called the attempts to harden silos beyond anything ever achieved "a public works project for the cement industry."

The President's men insisted that the issue was not Dense Pack but "modernization" of the land leg of the nation's nuclear triad. At the least, they argued, MX production should proceed as a bargaining chip in the START talks. But even Alabama Republican Jack Edwards, who directed pro-MX forces, conceded that the missile "is too expensive to use simply as a chip." The strongest argument for Reagan's position was offered by Michel, who sought to sow doubts about the ability of Congressmen to assess such technical matters. "In every age there are always well-meaning patriotic people who say we can defend freedom and peace just as well if we cut this or that weapons system," he said. Then he paused and asked, "But suppose they are wrong?"

In the end, it was a mere one-minute speech that had the greatest impact. Florida Democrat Charles Bennett, 72, a remarkably diligent legislator (he has not missed one of the 9,406 roll calls in the House since June 1951) with a reputation as a champion of defense spending, rose as the second-ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee. Said Bennett: "There is too much money at stake to spend it on such an incredible type of defense as Dense Pack. I believe it will be useless by the time it is in place."

The roll call was anticlimactic. The packed galleries rang with cheers when Speaker Tip O'Neill announced the results: 245 to 176 in favor of deleting the $988 million for MX production. Fifty Republicans had opposed Reagan. Only 38 Democrats had taken his side.

The next day, however, the House promptly rebuffed any interpretation that it was opposed to the general thrust of the President's record arms buildup. It shouted down attempts to eliminate $3.9 billion for production of the B-1 strategic bomber and $3.5 billion for one of two new nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. It passed the $231 billion defense appropriations bill for fiscal 1983, $48 billion more than this year's military outlays, but $18 billion less than Reagan wanted.

As the MX production battle moved to the Senate, Weinberger and Joint Chiefs Chairman John W Vessey Jr. ran into a cold reception from the Senate Armed Services Committee. Most of the Senators reaffirmed their support of the MX but badgered the Pentagon witnesses about all of the zigzags on basing the missile. Scolded Washington Democrat Henry Jackson: "The public's got the idea that this is a boondoggle, a Rube Goldberg." Georgia Democrat Sam Nunn, one of the Senate's most influential defense experts, warned: "I don't think you realize the trouble the MX basing model is in now."

Then Nunn drew a remarkable admission from General Vessey. He asked whether the Joint Chiefs all supported Dense Pack. With a rueful half-smile, Vessey conceded that three of the five did not. That confirmed the rumor circulating in the House. Vessey, an Army general, later clearly implied that only he and Air Force Chief of Staff Charles A. Gabriel had favored going ahead with Dense Pack. Opposed to Dense Pack until there is greater technical evidence of its ability to survive a Soviet first strike were Army Chief of Staff Edward C. Meyer, Chief of Naval Operations James D. Watkins and Marine Commandant Robert H. Barrow.

At week's end Reagan finally bowed to congressional realities. He announced that he was willing to delay indefinitely any final decision on how to deploy the MX. Meanwhile, he argued, the Senate should approve production funds for the MX, and the House should reconsider its rejection of those funds so that no time is lost in the missile's possible deployment. Said he: "I welcome a vigorous debate on the best way to base the missile."

The Dense Pack fiasco astonished congressional observers. The big question: How could anyone high in the White House have expected to conceal such a significant split among the Joint Chiefs from key defense legislators, who are often social as well as professional associates of the top generals?

Dense Pack was, in fact, mainly a creation of National Security Council Consultant Thomas Reed, a former Secretary of the Air Force, and National Security Adviser William Clark, who has no military expertise. Under a Dec. 1 deadline to come up with a basing system, the President rushed to oversell a plan whose flaws probably foredoomed it. That was pushing even Reagan's prowess as a communicator much too far.

--By Ed Magnuson. Reported by Neil MacNeil/Washington

With reporting by Neil MacNeil/Washington

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