Money Down a Silo

By voting twice to approve the construction of 21 more MX missiles at a cost of $1.5 billion, the Senate handed President Reagan a personal victory. But the vote was hardly a victory for common sense and genuine national security.

The MX is large--the biggest missile that this country has designed since the Titan of the early 1960s--highly accurate and capable of carrying up to 10 warheads more than 8,000 miles. The Administration proposes to deploy 100 of them, beginning late next year, in existing Minuteman missile silos in Wyoming and Nebraska.

Construction of the first 21 MXs is already under way. The question before Congress this month is whether to release the funds for another 21. The Administration’s request for $3.2 billion to build 48 additional MXs won’t come up for a vote before late summer.

During Tuesday’s MX debate, senator after senator rose to question the big missile’s ability to survive a Soviet first-strike attack, to regret its costly effect on the federal deficit and to note the virtues of other strategic nuclear systems that will be ready during the next three to 10 years.

Then many of the same senators announced that they would vote for the additional 21 MXs anyway, in order to avoid cutting the ground from under the President’s negotiators in Geneva. Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said, for example, that he was voting for the MX not because of its “military value” but to give the Administration “a position of strength” in dealing with the Soviets.

Opposition to the MX is much stronger in the Democratic-controlled House, where two crucial votes will be taken next week, but anti-MX forces there are no longer confident of victory in light of what happened in the Senate.

Many Democrats who are voting for the MX this time around say that they will not support the President’s follow-on request for an additional 48 missiles. Judging by Congress’ performance in the last few days, that is a thin reed indeed.

The fact is that it makes no sense to go forward with a $20-billion-to-$25-billion program at a time of budget stress purely to provide the President with a bargaining chip. The MX, deployed in vulnerable fixed silos, is not that powerful a bargaining chip even if the Pentagon is willing to halt the program in exchange for Soviet concessions at Geneva--and it apparently isn’t.

The MX missile program is a case of pouring money down a silo, and a tortured 10-vote margin of approval in the Senate does not improve the technology of it one whit. The House must follow the lead of its appropriations committee and vote against the continuation of the MX program.