Weapon and Target

One of the few things about the MX missile that detractors rarely criticize is the way it performs. Though still an experimental weapon (its full name is Missile Experimental), in seven operational tests the MX has given every indication that it can ably carry out its assigned function: conveying up to ten nuclear warheads to separate targets over ranges that exceed 8,000 miles. The missile, which is 71 ft. long, 92 in. in diameter and weighs 190,000 lbs. at launch, fires through four stages. In the final phase, a 4-ft.-long "bus," steered by an on-board guidance system and small propulsion jets, maneuvers to release the warheads on trajectories that would deliver them within 200 ft. of their precise destination.

The glitches that have dogged the MX for more than a dozen years have occurred in just about everything except its basic technology. The weapon was conceived as a counter to the new generation of Soviet missiles whose accuracy rendered the silo-based U.S. Minuteman increasingly vulnerable. But the MX until 1983 was a missile in search of a home, or basing mode. In an effort to make it "survivable," or impervious to a Soviet first strike, Pentagon planners studied at least 37 basing ideas, including one that would have kept the MX arsenal permanently airborne and another that would have shunted 200 missiles in and out of 4,600 shelters along underground rail tracks, keeping the enemy guessing about which shelters were in use at any given time. The Reagan Administration even proposed, and then quickly dropped, a "dense pack" cluster of missiles on the theory that some of the weapons would survive an attack if they were concentrated in one location.

The current plan is to base 100 missiles in existing Minuteman silos in eastern Wyoming and western Nebraska, the very storage points that were deemed indefensible at the beginning of the program. Theoretically, by firing just two warheads per MX silo, the Soviets could destroy the entire arsenal, taking out up to 1,000 U.S. warheads. The same attack could score less than a third as many "kills" against the Minutemen, since they are armed with a maximum of only three warheads. Thus, charge MX critics, by dangling a more threatening target in front of Soviet military strategists, yet failing to make it secure, the U.S. is actually increasing its vulnerability to a first strike. Says Senator Gary Hart, a leading opponent of the MX: "In a crisis, it becomes a stick of dynamite."

The Administration, which decried what it saw as a "window of vulnerability" in U.S. missile power before it took office in 1981, contends that the Minuteman silos can be "hardened" with additional concrete. But whether they would be strong enough even then is doubtful. In an attempt to defuse the issue, Air Force General Bennie Davis, commander of the Strategic Air Command, vainly sought to convince a congressional subcommittee three weeks ago that the "window" expression was shorthand not for silo exposure but for overall strategic inferiority.

Even if the Administration begins deploying the MX as scheduled by the fall of 1986, the missile will still serve only as a transition to other, less vulnerable weapons. A presidential commission headed by retired Air Force Lieut. General Brent Scowcroft, which reluctantly recommended basing the MX in Minuteman silos for the near future, also concluded that the U.S. should begin immediately building a 1,000-unit force of single-headed Midgetman missiles, which will be mobile--and less easily targetable.