Word: modeli
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...earlier, President Reagan had proposed retaining money to buy the missiles but freezing it only until next spring, when Congress would vote on a new basing mode...
...silo requires the combined explosive force of all of the missiles. But if one of them explodes first, the resulting blast will destroy or at least deflect all the others. This "fratricide" theory remains unproven, but it forms the core of the justification for the "dense pack" basing mode proposed for the MX. If it will work for the MX, as the Administration claims, then it should work for the existing Minuteman silos, which can be hardened relatively cheaply...
...better in the Republican-controlled Senate. "It's going to be very, very close," predicts one Senate insider. Texas Republican John Tower, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has praised Reagan for a "courageous" decision on the MX but has declined so far to endorse the basing mode. Opposition to Dense Pack is being led by South Carolina Democrat Ernest Rollings, an influential military hawk, who argues that "the Soviets would love nothing more than to see us throw away billions of dollars on a system that could be easily countered...
...prohibitive. It is as though the nation were being asked to buy an extremely expensive insurance policy with very small print warning that it might never pay off. For another, most members of Congress are sure to howl, "Not in my backyard, thank you!" The skinny Dense Pack basing mode, like the Race Track and the Shell Game and 29 others before it, is an accommodation to the hard fact that any large-scale MX scheme is subject to this double jeopardy. Political objections could, and should, be overcome if the weapon were truly essential to our defense...