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Many critics question Reagan's assertions of Soviet nuclear superiority, believe the disadvantages of MX deployment outweigh the benefits, and have grave doubts about the feasibility of the Dense Pack basing mode (see following stories). It is roughly the 30th option considered by the Air Force, which long favored the "racetrack" system supported in 1979 by President Carter. This involved shuttling 200 MX missiles on flatbed trailers among 4,600 shelters in Utah and Nevada. That $34 billion plan was buried under a barrage of environmental and political opposition, including that of Presidential Candidate Reagan...
Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, who favored the "big bird" scheme of putting the MX on continuously flying aircraft, last year urged that the MX be placed temporarily in specially hardened silos that now contain the Minuteman, the nation's dominant ICBM. The 1,000 Minutemen currently deployed carry a total of more than 2,100 warheads. Congress rejected that option on the ground that the MX would remain as vulnerable as the Minuteman is claimed to be, because new Soviet rockets are so accurate that a first strike could conceivably wipe the MX out. The lawmakers threatened...
...miles wide. Their concrete-and-steel silos would be hardened to a degree never before attained by engineers. The 100 holes would be spaced 1,800 ft. apart-a distance computed by Pentagon scientists as too great to permit a single Soviet warhead from knocking out more than one MX, but close enough so that the blasts from the first enemy warheads would disable those coming in behind. This Fratricide theory is untested and much debated among nuclear physicists (see box). If the theory is valid, more than half the MX missiles would survive an initial attack...
...paper explaining his decision, Reagan conceded with great understatement that "deciding how to deploy the missile has not been easy." He described the Dense Pack plan only as "a reasonable way" to deter an attack. Theories on how the U.S.S.R. might find techniques to destroy the closely spaced MX missiles were dismissed as "technical dreams on which no Soviet planner or politician would bet the fate of his country...
Critics, of course, turn the argument around, contending that MX too is based on "technical dreams" and that even now, no responsible Soviet official could gamble on being able to destroy the U.S. Minuteman missiles with a first strike. Contends Paul Warlike, President Carter's chief arms negotiator: "The Soviets would have no certainty of carrying out such a strike using missiles they've never fired over a trajectory they've never tested...