Word: mx
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...always been an unlikely alliance: liberal Democrats joining with the Reagan Administration to save the controversial MX missile. But Congressmen Les Aspin of Wisconsin, Norman Dicks of Washington, and Albert Gore Jr. of Tennessee never promised their support with no strings attached. When the Scowcroft Commission's report on strategic forces came out last April, the three were widely credited with engineering the package's major quid pro quo: congressional support for the MX in exchange for the Administration's good-faith pursuit of a U.S.-Soviet arms-control deal. So far the Congressmen have delivered...
Aspin has now publicly put the Administration on notice that it must modify its arms-control policy or Congress will begin to starve the MX. In a letter to retired Air Force Lieut. General Brent Scowcroft, made public last week, Aspin called on the commission Scowcroft chairs to formulate a new U.S. proposal for the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) and recommended that the Administration agree to substitute the commission's version for its own. The letter also outlines broad suggestions for modifying the U.S. stance at START...
Aspin made clear that his vote and those of other pro-MX Democrats hinge on arms-control progress. Said he: "People aren't about to be snookered." That message is not new. Aspin, Dicks and Gore sounded the same warning in early August at a private White House meeting with National Security Adviser William Clark. But the pressure is being turned up at a time when both the START talks and the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) talks in Geneva are in a deepfreeze...
...White House is mindful of the potential 1984 election benefits of progress in arms control. But it insists that the MX is an essential bargaining lever to achieve that goal. Still, the growing congressional pressure is sure to widen the already existing split between the Administration's moderates, who favor an arms-control agreement in part to help re-elect Reagan, and its hardliners, who remain deeply suspicious that the Soviets will ever negotiate seriously. The key defense appropriations votes in the Senate could come very close to the scheduled resumption of the START talks in early October...
...neither the White House nor the Democratic congressional leadership is willing to yield ground to cut spending and raise taxes enough to prevent more economic chaos. The sentiment grows in Washington for yet another presidential commission to resolve the deadlock: a device used for the dilemmas on the MX missile, Social Security, Central America and hunger. While it has helped produce notable results for the MX and Social Security issues, the resort to the commission procedure represents an admission of political gridlock...