Word: mx
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...PLAIN folks, sending a telegram overseas usually costs about a dollar or two. But last week Washington spent $1.5 billion on a message to our allies and the Soviets. By okaying funds for the controversial MX missile and thereby ending years of rancorous debate, Congress showed for all the world its readiness to back President Reagan's peace through strength rhetoric with action...
What was so disturbing, then, about the MX vote was the Reagan Administration's success in persuading a majority of lawmakers to pursue the goal of a strong defense blindly. The faults of this particular multiple warhead system are many and well-documented, chief among them being its vulnerability to a knock out strike. But the President made clear through his no-holds-barred lobbying effort that he was less concerned with the quality of the system deployed than just deploying something to demonstrate firmness to Moscow and its Geneva delegation. Similarly, a refusal to undermine our negotiators at arms...
...glitches that have dogged the MX for more than a dozen years have occurred in just about everything except its basic technology. The weapon was conceived as a counter to the new generation of Soviet missiles whose accuracy rendered the silo-based U.S. Minuteman increasingly vulnerable. But the MX until 1983 was a missile in search of a home, or basing mode. In an effort to make it "survivable," or impervious to a Soviet first strike, Pentagon planners studied at least 37 basing ideas, including one that would have kept the MX arsenal permanently airborne and another that would have...
...current plan is to base 100 missiles in existing Minuteman silos in eastern Wyoming and western Nebraska, the very storage points that were deemed indefensible at the beginning of the program. Theoretically, by firing just two warheads per MX silo, the Soviets could destroy the entire arsenal, taking out up to 1,000 U.S. warheads. The same attack could score less than a third as many "kills" against the Minutemen, since they are armed with a maximum of only three warheads. Thus, charge MX critics, by dangling a more threatening target in front of Soviet military strategists, yet failing...
Even if the Administration begins deploying the MX as scheduled by the fall of 1986, the missile will still serve only as a transition to other, less vulnerable weapons. A presidential commission headed by retired Air Force Lieut. General Brent Scowcroft, which reluctantly recommended basing the MX in Minuteman silos for the near future, also concluded that the U.S. should begin immediately building a 1,000-unit force of single-headed Midgetman missiles, which will be mobile--and less easily targetable...