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President Reagan's nationally televised speech last week was a tour de force. It is difficult to imagine a more effective, persuasive and reassuring presentation of his decision to pack the MX densely into a remote corner of Wyoming. He demonstrated something like perfect pitch in fine-tuning his appeal for support of the largest nuclear weapons system in American history and the simultaneous pursuit of deep reductions in the arsenals of the superpowers. But it will take more than rhetorical skills to dissolve the doubts that have been cast on the wisdom of the MX decision. In fact...
...Administration maintains, the MX is absolutely vital to American safety-if we quite literally cannot live without it-then why put a hundred of the missiles in one spot? Does not the basing plan exacerbate the problem it is supposed to solve, which is the vulnerability of American missiles to a Soviet preemptive first strike? Asked this question on the eve of the President's speech, an Administration official charged with helping to sell the program shrugged his shoulders and conceded that there was "something counterintuitive" about the concept. That is a fancy way of saying it defies common...
...years, viewers of the TV evening news have been treated to animated illustrations of ways that the Soviets might be able to destroy the MX in its various Rube Goldberg basing schemes, including this latest one. Designers of the various plans have responded that the Soviets could not be sure of knocking out all of the MXs. Therefore the existence of the MX would introduce a cautionary, salutary factor of uncertainty into Soviet calculations. Maybe so. But the same argument can be turned around. There is always some doubt about any new weapons system, especially a nuclear one that cannot...
...never pay off. For another, most members of Congress are sure to howl, "Not in my backyard, thank you!" The skinny Dense Pack basing mode, like the Race Track and the Shell Game and 29 others before it, is an accommodation to the hard fact that any large-scale MX scheme is subject to this double jeopardy. Political objections could, and should, be overcome if the weapon were truly essential to our defense. But in this instance, its military shortcomings magnify its political liabilities...
Reagan also made an arms-control case for the system. By hinting broadly that the MX is to be a bargaining chip in the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) in Geneva, he implied that the U.S. will cancel the MX program if the U.S.S.R. accepts the proposal for deep reductions in strategic weapons that Reagan unveiled last May. That possibility, however, is at odds with the official Administration position, reiterated privately after the President spoke, that the U.S. needs the densely packed MX in any event. The Administration has proposed a ceiling on ICBM warheads of 2,500 per side...