Word: mx
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...that cost too much to buy in sufficient quantities, and instead to concentrate on small, reliable, and cheap weapons. Applying this principle, Hart recently proposed a defense budget that would save more than $100 billion in spending authority over the next five years by eliminating useless gadgets like the MX, the B-1B, the Bradley fighting vehicle, and AH-64 attack helicopter, and the F-18 fighter. Hart, incidentally, supports the nuclear weapons freeze...
Weinberger used his briefing to stress the need for passing the Administration's 1984 defense budget intact. "Without the MX missile, the Trident submarine and the B-1 bomber, we will be accepting permanent nuclear inferiority," he said. Weinberger's campaign to win congressional approval for his spending plans will be long and difficult. At a meeting earlier in the week, Republican leaders of the Senate Budget Committee urged Weinberger to accept significant cuts. Chairman Pete Domenici of New Mexico has indicated that the proposed increase in spending of 10% after inflation may have to be sliced...
Where does this leave the MX? A presidential commission is studying that question. I will address one issue: Should we have a "counterforce" capability (an ability to strike accurately at Soviet missile silos or command centers), or should we continue to aim for "assured destruction" of civilian and industrial targets? Ever since the Soviets began to approach strategic parity, it should have been obvious that a strategy aiming at civilian destruction was an irrational, suicidal, indeed nihilistic course that no President could implement. Undiscriminating slaughter is not a defense policy but a prelude to unilateral disarmament...
Similarly, why should a Soviet counterforce capability-as now exists-be treated as consistent with strategic stability, while our attempt, represented by the MX, to provide a much smaller means to respond is considered as somehow destabilizing? If the U.S., by its abdication, guarantees the invulnerability of Soviet missile forces while the Soviets keep ours exposed, any Soviet incentive for serious negotiation will vanish. A secure Soviet first-strike capability poses an unprecedented danger-ultimately that it may some day be used, in the near term that it may increase Soviet willingness to run risks in regional crises...
Whatever level of MX deployment is recommended by the Scowcroft Commission should be strategically meaningful beyond a mere token deployment. At the same time, the MX, like the new single-warhead missile, should be an organic part of an arms-control strategy. To this end, we should offer to postpone MX deployment if the Soviets agree to destroy MIRVed null (their heavy missiles) over three years starting in 1986, and to abandon MX altogether once the SS-18s are dismantled...