Word: minuteman
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...crucial win for the Administration, which plans to deploy the 96-ton, ten-warhead missiles in modified Minuteman silos in 1986. "We need the MX," President Reagan urged Congress in a letter, "not only for force modernization but to keep the Soviets moving at the negotiation tables." Expected Senate approval of the funding was held up by a filibuster by Democrat Gary Hart of Colorado, a presidential candidate, who lambasted the missile as a "vulnerable, destabilizing, first-strike weapon...
Crucial to congressional endorsement was the Scowcroft Commission report released in April. The panel recommended the deployment of 100 MX missiles in existing Minuteman silos, implying that the ten-warhead launcher is a necessary lever in arms negotiations with the Soviets. But the commission linked MX development to arms control and proposed the deployment of smaller, mobile, single-warhead Midgetman missiles in the 1990s that would be less vulnerable to attack...
...Republic calls their product "one of the most serious and sophisticated official documents of the nuclear era." The members of the Commission made 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...
...missile submarines, with the bigger and better Trident on the way. We have bombers capable of striking the Soviet Union and incapable of being completely knocked out by a first strike. The technology for a new smaller missile wouldn't be that much different from the 20 year old Minuteman, and there is no "emergency" to require anything further. If the President really wants "attainment of stability at the lowest possible level of forces," then his only reasons for supporting MX are automatic. The reflexes of "bigger is better and "what the Russians have, we must have" have won another...
...warhead missile seemed permanently grounded. Then the blue-ribbon Scowcroft Commission recommended last month that the U.S. develop a smaller, possibly mobile, single-warhead Midgetman missile. In the meantime, the commission suggested, the U.S. should demonstrate its political will by placing 100 MX missiles in existing Minuteman silos, even though these sites might be vulnerable to attack. Key members of Congress wanted the Midgetman, as well as a more flexible approach to arms control. President Reagan wanted the MX and was willing to make concessions to get it. The result: the MX rose from the ashes last week, while...