Within days after boasting that, under the terms of the SALT II Treaty, the United States will be permitted to build the MX mobile missile, the Carter Administration began laying plans to scuttle it unilaterally. The hatchet man is Defense Secretary Harold Brown who learned such scuttling techniques when he was Secretary of the Air Force under Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.
The problem is that, in this era of fast-moving technology, our Minuteman missiles will soon be so vulnerable to attack that they will be obsolete for all practical purposes. Indeed, on the recent “Meet The Press” program, Defense Secretary Brown, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, and their questioners spoke casually about our “vulnerable” Minuteman missile force.
This is because the accuracy and the power of Soviet ICBMs are increasing so rapidly that they can “take out” (destroy) our Minuteman missiles in their hardened concrete silos.
One way to avoid having our Minuteman missiles destroyed would be for the United States to adopt a launch-on-verification-of-warning strategy. This would involve a simple announcement by our President or Secretary of State that, if we received verified confirmation that the U.S.S.R. had launched its SS-9s and SS-18s at us, we would immediately launch our Minuteman missiles at them, leaving only empty holes for the Soviet missiles to hit. On the same “Meet The Press,” Brown and Vance refused to say this is our strategy, leaving Russians and Americans to conclude that there is a 50-50 chance that our President will leave our Minuteman missiles in their silos like sitting ducks to be destroyed by the Soviet ICBMs.
There is another way to safeguard against the vulnerability of our Minuteman missiles: to build and deploy the MX mobile missile. The strategy of the MX mobile is to combine missile power with one of the greatest American assets: our far-flung and efficient transportation system.
Three alternative deployment plans have been under consideration: (1) the so-called “shell-game” basing system in which about 250 MX missiles would be shuttled at random among thousands of underground silos so that the enemy would never know which silos housed the missiles at any given time; (2) deploying the MX aboard a new type of cargo plane which could be moved at will; and (3) deploying it on big trucks that would keep rolling on the highways.
At a White House meeting in May presided over by Secretary Brown, he laid the groundwork to scuttle all three alternatives and substitute hypothetical talk about the future possibility of building more submarine-launched missiles. The rationale for this was that abandoning the MX mobile missile would “facilitate future arms control talks with the Soviet Union.”
SALT II isn’t even yet signed or ratified, but Secretary Brown is already making concessions to the Soviets for SALT III! Yet to cancel the MX mobile missile would mean phasing out (abandoning) the entire land-based missile leg of our Triad, and relying exclusively on submarines and our old, slow B-52 bombers.
The Soviets do not need to worry about the vulnerability of their missile force. The United States has no “heavy” missiles of the SS-9 or SS-18 class which can destroy Soviet ICBMs in their concrete silos, even assuming we can find them all in the tremendous land mass of the U.S.S.R. with its tight security.
Harold Brown and Cyrus Vance learned their weapons-scrapping techniques when they were Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s lieutenants in the 1960s. It is a technique of discussing “alternatives” ad infinitum, “reserving options” for future decisions which are never made, and cancelling weapon systems which have been developed and are ready for production in favor of those that exist only on the drawing board.
Major weapon systems cancelled with these methods during the 1960s by Defense Secretary McNamara, Deputy Defense Secretary Cyrus Vance, or Air Secretary Brown included the Skybolt missile, the B-70 bomber, the AMSB (advanced manned strategic bomber), the 24-megaton bomb, Pluto, Dynasoar, Orion, and the anti-missile missile.
The end result has been to keep America in a strategic weapons freeze since 1967.
