Word: minuteman
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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...
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...
...missiles and honing their accuracy all the time. So there is certainly a need for the U.S. to modernize its deterrent. But it can do that without Dense Pack, leaving the job of attacking silos to the Trident II and the most accurate, multiple-warhead version of the Minuteman. Perhaps at some point in the future, a portion of those Minuteman missiles could be replaced by MXs-in existing silos, rather than in some elaborate "protective/deceptive" basing plan. That might be necessary if the Soviets have not, in the meantime, agreed to significant cutbacks in their own land-based, silo...
...much vaunted missile force, which Reagan cites as proof of Soviet superiority, is far less diversified and mobile than America's. In a few years the most threatening of the Soviet rockets will themselves be threatened by the latest U.S. warheads. Some of those are already deployed on Minuteman intercontinental missiles, and others are destined for the Trident II submarine-launched missile and the MX. Even if the MX is defeated by political opposition, the Minuteman and the Trident II programs could still expose the Soviet Union to a mirror image of the "window of vulnerability" that so worries...
...next year and running through 1985. Meanwhile, a no-frills private-enterprise launching service, Space Services Inc., successfully tested a launch rocket last summer at Matagorda Island, Texas. The prototype rocket, dubbed Conestoga I, was built in part from spare NASA assemblies, including the motor from a solid-fuel Minuteman missile. The firm's owners now plan to go into commercial service in 1984, with monthly launches starting two years later. With space technology rapidly advancing and the competition for launches beginning to perk up, prices may start dropping out of orbit long before the satellites do. -By Christopher...