No nuclear deterrent, no matter how effective, is any good if the enemy does not believe in it.
The 10-warhead MX missile is a powerful nuclear weapon, but it has lost credibility as a deterrent because the military and the Congress have failed to decide on a workable means of deploying it. The suggestions considered have ranged from the impractical–the ”racetrack” spread out over large parts of two states–to the bizarre: dangling the missiles from dirigibles or having them claw their way out of mountainsides.
The present scheme of inserting MX missiles into Minutemen silos makes them too vulnerable to a Soviet first strike. The danger this presents was a major factor in Congress` decision to cut back the MX order to 50 missiles.
So now the Air Force is at the drawing boards again, spending $6 million on a study of whether the missile, its launcher and launching electronics can be packaged in a nuclear-attack-resistent hardened canister, which would be hauled from place to place along another ”racetrack.”
While this imaginative Pentagon exercise is underway, the administration continues to talk tough about its ”Star Wars” Strategic Defense Initiative, which President Reagan persists in advancing as a space-borne weapons network that can shoot down all Soviet ICBMs with directed energy beams and thus render nuclear warfare obsolete.
The administration has talked tough with the Russians about Star Wars, but the Kremlin must be well aware of that the scientific doubt about whether any system can work well enough to defend cities is deep, to say the least. What SDI can do very effectively, however, is provide the kind of protection for the MX and other U.S. ICBMs that all the racetrack and Roto-Rooter schemes demonstrably cannot. This is surely why the Kremlin is so afraid of SDI.
Why not then proceed with it as a defense package for the MX? Why not present it to Soviet arms control negotiators–not to speak of Congress and the taxpayers–in those realistic terms? Realism could go a long way toward establishing credibility.
