A Deterrent That Deters

In the next few weeks, President Bush must decide how to proceed with the modernization of our ICBM force. The dilemma, often complicated by the appearance of newly viable (and some not so viable) alternatives and concurrent factional fights, reaches back to the Carter Administration. The main issues are “survivability” (how invulnerable a missile is to increasingly accurate Soviet warheads) and mission (what the missile’s actual role is within our land, air, and sea strategic triad).

As part of the 1981 defense build-up, President Reagan announced plans to build one hundred MX missiles, placing the first forty in existing Minuteman silos pending selection of a survivable basing mode. He rejected out of hand Carter’s multiple-protected-shelter (MPS) plan, which would have played a “shell game” with the Soviets, shuttling two hundred MX missiles amongst 4,600 hardened shelters in the Utah and Nevada deserts. There were three main reasons for that rejection: Senators Hatch (R., Utah), Garn (R., Utah), and Laxalt (R., Nev.), all good, conservative friends of Reagan worried about the reaction of their constituents. But MPS was not a perfect solution anyway, since it depended on the Soviets’ living up to their treaty obligations and not “fractionating” their heavy ICBMs—packing as many as thirty or forty warheads into an SS-18 (currently a ten-warhead missile) to overwhelm the shell game.

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Damian Housman

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In the next few weeks, President Bush must decide how to proceed with the modernization of our ICBM force. The dilemma, often complicated by the appearance of newly viable (and some not so viable) alternatives and concurrent factional fights, reaches back to the Carter Administration. The main issues are “survivability” (how invulnerable a missile is to increasingly accurate Soviet warheads) and mission (what the missile’s actual role is within our land, air, and sea strategic triad).

As part of the 1981 defense build-up, President Reagan announced plans to build one hundred MX missiles, placing the first forty in existing Minuteman silos pending selection of a survivable basing mode. He rejected out of hand Carter’s multiple-protected-shelter (MPS) plan, which would have played a “shell game” with the Soviets, shuttling two hundred MX missiles amongst 4,600 hardened shelters in the Utah and Nevada deserts. There were three main reasons for that rejection: Senators Hatch (R., Utah), Garn (R., Utah), and Laxalt (R., Nev.), all good, conservative friends of Reagan worried about the reaction of their constituents. But MPS was not a perfect solution anyway, since it depended on the Soviets’ living up to their treaty obligations and not “fractionating” their heavy ICBMs—packing as many as thirty or forty warheads into an SS-18 (currently a ten-warhead missile) to overwhelm the shell game.