Word: minuteman
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...presidential attention and public print that citizens can be forgiven for some confusion over why President Reagan-and Jimmy Carter before him-decided that the U.S. needs an MX system in the first place. There is a one-word answer: vulnerability. In the opinion of many U.S. arms experts, Minuteman, the principal American intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) since the mid-1960s, has become an exposed target-and therefore conceivably a temptation-for a pre-emptive Soviet attack. And if the 1,000 Minuteman missiles are no longer safe, the nation may not be either. In the jargon of nuclear deterrence...
Many military and political experts, including all those in key posts in the Reagan Administration, have come to accept vulnerability as an unhappy fact of life, fully justifying MX's price tag of as much as $100 billion. Also, concern over the Minuteman's jeopardy is at the core of a much more general anxiety: that U.S. defenses across the board have become vulnerable...
...just how vulnerable is Minuteman? Vulnerability has not been established by experience. If it had been, the U.S. would now largely be a radioactive wasteland or a Soviet colony or both. Rather, vulnerability is a hypothetical condition. It arises in worst-case scenarios about what might happen-in the guidance systems of rockets, in outer space over the North Pole, in underground silos beneath the incinerated landscapes of the American Northwest and in the minds of men in Washington and Moscow-during the first half-hour of World War III. While highly conjectural, the problem of determining vulnerability must still...
...would be bigger, more powerful and more accurate than a Titan or Minuteman, and the Soviets, in theory, would never know which of the shelters to target with their missiles if they decided to attack. The scheme has been criticized both because of its cost?in excess of $75 billion?and because it would tear up enormous chunks of America's West. (The drag strip would occupy an area the size of New Jersey...
...first President in 20 years to devote a greater share of the national budget to social programs than to defense. Gerald Ford proposed some modest increases in real defense spending, but they were trimmed back by the overwhelmingly Democratic Congresses of his day. Jimmy Carter closed a Minuteman assembly line, canceled the neutron bomb and delayed cruise missile production. The public's insistence on "no more Viet Nams" and a hope that détente with the Soviet Union would make war unlikely contributed heavily to the military-spending hold-downs and stretch-outs. And if that did not constitute trouble...