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Harvard defense observers yesterday gave mixed reviews to Reagan's recent proposal for deploying the MX missile, with several terming it politically motivated and militarily unsound...
...chief military disadvantage, several observers said, was that the MX basing system adopted by Reagan--placing 100 MX missiles in existing silos--would not reduce the long-term "vulnerability" of land-based U.S. missiles to Soviet attack, the reason the MX had been proposed in the first place...
Even if one accepts the Reagan point of view that we now live with a "window of vulnerability," enabling the Russians to knock out our land-based bombs, the mobile MX still adds up to a colossal mistake. Assuming the Soviet Union can destroy our 1000 Minutemen, it could eventually gain the capacity to knock out 2300 MX sites. Some estimates show that the USSR would have that ability before completion of a mobile MX system, placing the United States in the same "vulnerable" position...
That is where the ABM comes in. Proponents say it would significantly reduce the Soviet Union's chances of destroying all the MX missiles on a first strike. But to deploy ABMs would scuttle one of the most significant achievements of arms limitation talks--a ban on ABMs--and would prompt a costly ABM race. Relying on ABMs would also defy good sense. They were abandoned in the first place because they lead to destabilization of the delicate strategic balance and because they are unreliable; ABM technology has reportedly not advanced to a point where an ABM system would...
...where does all this leave the MX? Perhaps, realizing the weight of logic, the Reagan administration wants the mobile missile only to use as a negotiating device in some future arms limitation talks. But such talks are a long way off, and the $100 billion MX would be an expensive bargaining chip. If the Reagan administration is committed to the MX missile, as it seems to be, it will have to come up with a better argument for deploying it than the oft-touted "window of vulnerability." For now--especially since the administration is looking for new ways to reduce...