Word: mx
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...votes, the House refused to give Ronald Reagan something the President had insisted, with all the persuasive flourishes of his best prime-time TV oratory, that America urgently needs to counter the Soviet Union's threatening nuclear arsenal: money to begin production of the 96-ton MX missile with its ten-warhead punch...
Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger warned the Senate Armed Services Committee that if the Senate too blocks MX production funds, the U.S. would be "telling the world we are disarming unilaterally." Edward Rowny, the chief U.S. negotiator in the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks with the Soviet Union in Geneva, predicted that without the MX, the U.S. will find it "extremely difficult" to achieve a START agreement. Secretary of State George Shultz, attending NATO and trade meetings in Brussels, struggled to convince the allies that resistance to the MX in the U.S. is not quite the same as resistance in some Western...
...Administration stumbled on the MX missile's most glaring weakness: after more than eight years of study, the expenditure of $4.5 billion on the missile and consideration of some 30 options, the Pentagon still lacks a politically acceptable and scientifically credible basing mode for its sophisticated bird. Reagan, Weinberger and a flurry of military papers and briefings had all failed in the rush to sell Dense Pack, the basing plan that would plant 100 of the 71-ft.-tall missiles in a 21-sq.-mi. strip of Wyoming, 14 miles long by 1.5 miles wide. Proponents argued that because...
Technically, the House did not vote on Dense Pack. It only eliminated $988 million sought by the Administration to produce the first five of the 226 MX missiles it wants to acquire in a program that would cost at least $30 billion. In fact, the House readily approved spending $2.5 billion for continued research and development of the MX and its basing system, presumably something other than Dense Pack. The House did not reject Reagan's basic argument that the 1,000 Minutemen are vulnerable to a first strike from improved Soviet ICBMs and that the MX is needed...
...York's Democratic Congressman Joseph Addabbo, 57, an obscure and almost shy eleven-term Representative from Queens, led the fight against MX production. He had heard Air Force officers briefing House members on Dense Pack. "That went over like a lead balloon," he recalled later. "The more they tried to explain Dense Pack, the less the members knew." Addabbo had also heard that not even the Joint Chiefs of Staff were wholly behind Dense Pack...