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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...
When the President's Commission on Strategic Forces met for the first time on Jan. 7, even Brent Scowcroft, its energetic chairman, doubted that it could achieve by its Feb. 18 deadline what the Pentagon, the Ford, Carter and Reagan Administrations and Congress had been unable to do in seven years: find a technically practical and politically acceptable home for the MX missile, the intercontinental bird that only its parent Air Force seems truly to love. Last week, in a chat with President Reagan, members of the commission won an extension of the deadline to the end of March...
Commission spokesmen insist that the group is still considering "the whole range" of options, and Scowcroft readily concedes that all of them "have warts." Nonetheless, possibly in an attempt to influence the commission, some members of Congress have floated reports that the group is leaning toward a two-phase deployment plan. In the first phase, an unspecified number of the MX missiles would be placed in existing Minuteman silos after the holes are reinforced to withstand a higher level of enemy warhead blasts. The Senate last year rejected a Reagan proposal to do just that with MX on the grounds...
Whether any real cheer is warranted remains to be seen. Meanwhile, the White House chose former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft to head a new commission that will study ways to deploy the MX missile. Other members will include three former Secretaries of Defense and, reportedly, Alexander Haig, who quit as Reagan's Secretary of State only six months ago. The study will presumably lead the commission into a broad review of the composition and strategy of all U.S. nuclear forces, whether or not agreement can be reached with the Soviets on limiting them...
Sonnenfeldt chaired the session, which included Administration officials and about a dozen outside experts. Among those invited: Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and two of his predecessors, Harold Brown and Donald Rumsfeld; Brent Scowcroft, National Security Adviser to President Ford; and Norman Podhoretz, a neoconservative writer and Administration critic. "It's an effort to break out and listen, to avoid being caught in my cocoon," says Shultz...