Word: midgetman
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...three basic recommendations. Discard the notion of U.S. strategic inferiority by considering simultaneously bombers, missiles and submarines, deploy 100 MXs, each with 10 warheads, in hardened Minuteman silos, and for the future, move away from Multiple. Independent Re entry Vehicles (MIRVs) towards a small, single warhead missile appropriately dubbed "Midgetman...
...convenient MX. But that gullibility should not prevent it from acting on the more nearly solutions Scowcroft had to offer. After essentially reducing the MX to sugar for its recommendations, the Commission introduced a final pill which shouldn't be hard to swallow at all. The pill is Midgetman, a small, mobile missile with a single warhead that could be produced in large numbers, if needed, at relatively low cost. Such a non-threatening, land-based ICBM follows naturally from the Commission's argument that the "window of vulnerability" was never open in the first place. And of course...
...Midgetman, as Scowcroft showed, is the way to avoid all of this A growth in the numbers of launchers (i.e. targets) without an increase in the number of warheads would deter the Soviets by increasing their uncertainty of first strike success. And it would leave them free to pursue a similar policy, making the deterrence mutual...
Reagan has called the recommendation a "desirable evolution to ward small, single warhead ICBMs" it may have been MX that ensured the White House would take Midgetman and the other points seriously. But the giant ICBM will dominate the years between now and any deployment of a smaller weapon probably in the mid 1990s...
...reflexes of "bigger is better and "what the Russians have, we must have" have won another victory in Washington. Congress needs to rise above this glacial inertia while there is still time, move quickly past MX, and go with the weapons systems that ensure peace bombers, submarines, and Midgetman...