Word: mx
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...President's rhetoric was hardly new. He used the same "bargaining chip" argument to win funding for the controversial MX missile. Increasingly, however, Congressmen are fixated on the bottom line. Though Reagan spoke of seeking only "modest 3% annual growth," in fact his budget request for 1987 calls for a hike of at least 12% over 1986 spending, from $278.4 billion to $311.6 billion. Furthermore, the Congressional Budget Office calculated that the President's defense budget underestimates its true cost by $14.5 billion. Most Congressmen believe that in the end the President will be lucky to hold next year...
...original goal was to build a missile that could survive a Soviet attack in sufficient numbers to pose a credible threat of retaliation. The big, three-warhead Minuteman is vulnerable to destruction in its silos. The ten- warhead MX is no answer. Though it was supposed to be mobile, the Pentagon could never come up with an acceptable basing mode. The 50 MX's that Congress has agreed to fund are to be parked in Minuteman silos, where they too could be sitting ducks...
Midgetman's chief support came from a 1983 presidential commission appointed by Reagan to come up with a basing plan for the 10-warhead MX...
While the commission said the MX should be deployed in stationary silos, it called for development of a mobile, single-warhead missile in the future...
...commission argued that in a crisis, the Midgetman would be a less tempting target for a Soviet first strike because it would take numerous attacking warheads to destroy a mobile missile and even then the attackers would only knock out one missile. That contrasts with the stationary MX and its 10 warheads...