Word: scowcrofts
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...called a "bipartisan consensus" on Capitol Hill over the arms control issue, the President hailed the House Appropriations Committee's vote to release $625 million in funding for the controversial MX missile, in return for presidential acceptance of arms control measures contained in the Administration's own Scowcroft report...
CONGRESS, at Reagan's urging, passed funding for the convenient MX. But that gullibility should not prevent it from acting on the more nearly solutions Scowcroft had to offer. After essentially reducing the MX to sugar for its recommendations, the Commission introduced a final pill which shouldn't be hard to swallow at all. The pill is Midgetman, a small, mobile missile with a single warhead that could be produced in large numbers, if needed, at relatively low cost. Such a non-threatening, land-based ICBM follows naturally from the Commission's argument that the "window of vulnerability" was never...
Midgetman, as Scowcroft showed, is the way to avoid all of this A growth in the numbers of launchers (i.e. targets) without an increase in the number of warheads would deter the Soviets by increasing their uncertainty of first strike success. And it would leave them free to pursue a similar policy, making the deterrence mutual...
When Congress last year killed the dense pack basing plan for the MX, the 96-ton ten-warhead missile seemed permanently grounded. Then the blue-ribbon Scowcroft Commission recommended last month that the U.S. develop a smaller, possibly mobile, single-warhead Midgetman missile. In the meantime, the commission suggested, the U.S. should demonstrate its political will by placing 100 MX missiles in existing Minuteman silos, even though these sites might be vulnerable to attack. Key members of Congress wanted the Midgetman, as well as a more flexible approach to arms control. President Reagan wanted the MX and was willing...
...revival of the MX was shrewdly engineered by the President. Reagan lobbied hard in public, declaring on a political foray into Ohio that "if Congress rejects these [Scowcroft] proposals, it will have dealt a blow to our national security that no foreign power would ever have been able to accomplish." Then he met privately with legislators who remained skeptical about the MX. He also sent accommodating notes to lawmakers who had asked for changes in the Administration's negotiating position in the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks with the Soviet Union, which are scheduled to resume in Geneva on June...