Word: mx
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Seeing that he was outnumbered, Burt looked for a way to give the State Department option what he called "a little sex appeal." He suggested proposing to the Soviets a straight swap: the U.S. would cancel its program to develop the MX if the Soviets would dismantle all 308 of their SS-18 heavies...
Burt got the idea from two veterans of SALT, Lieut. General Brent Scowcroft (ret.), who was advising the Administration on what to do about the MX, and William Hyland, then a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and now the editor of Foreign Affairs. Scowcroft and Hyland had been aides to Kissinger and later ran the NSC staff during the Ford Administration...
...idea of trading off the MX for the SS-18 was that the Administration as a whole, and Reagan in particular, decided that the U.S. must have the MX no matter what the outcome of START. Like cruise missiles and bombers, the MX was thus to be unavailable as a bargaining chip. The U.S. might settle for a smaller number of MXs with a START agreement than it would otherwise have deployed, but the missile system was seen as an indispensable part of the U.S.'s "strategic modernization" program...
...time of the first NSC meeting devoted to START, in April 1982, the State Department's idea of a straightforward trade-off between the MX and the SS-18 was dead, and the advocates of a low throw-weight ceiling seemed to have the upper hand. On the eve of the meeting, Perle circulated a paper that criticized State for advocating an approach that offered "the appearance but not the reality of significant limits on Soviet strategic power ... and [that] would drive the Administration to a repetition of past mistakes...
Second, a low launcher ceiling would enhance the rationale for their cherished MX. Since a single MX will carry ten warheads, it is an efficient way of fitting many warheads under a low launcher ceiling...