Did Senate Vote Deal Fatal Blow to Future of MX?

The lopsided Senate vote to limit deployment of the MX missile to 50 unless the Reagan Administration can find another basing plan dealt a profound and perhaps fatal blow to the future growth of the MX program.

Pentagon officials Friday portrayed the vote as a victory in light of efforts in Congress to limit deployment to 40 and vowed to press ahead toward a goal of 100 missiles. But the Senate decision Thursday represents one of the extremely rare occasions in which Congress has made a clear--and possibly successful--effort to sharply curtail a major weapons program already under way.

In the Senate and the House, which has yet to act on MX funding for 1986, the consensus is that no more than 50 will ever be deployed.

The basing question has been among the most difficult to resolve in the years-long battle over the 195,000-pound, 10-warhead missile. And Administration officials concede that--politically and technically--there is little realistic hope of coming up with an acceptable alternative to existing silos in the West.

“The Congress, at least the Senate, has confronted the Administration with the necessity to go over that whole dreary basing question again,” said a senior Pentagon official, speaking on condition that he not be identified by name.

But the chance of discovering a new basing plan that would satisfy Congress has left Pentagon officials skeptical, and there is little sign of fresh ideas that would dissolve congressional opposition.

Weinberger Unenthusiastic

“We will certainly re-examine” the various basing concepts, Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger said Thursday without much enthusiasm, adding that the question of how to deploy the weapons had been “settled pretty well” when Reagan decided to place them in underground silos now housing Minuteman missiles in Wyoming and Nebraska. Congressional objections to that system focus on what critics consider the silos’ vulnerability--without reconstruction to make them “super- hard”--to a direct strike by Soviet weapons.

“My judgment is that the Administration, if it wants to go beyond 50, will have to eat crow and go for some form of mobility,” the senior Pentagon official said.

R. James Woolsey, a member of Reagan’s Commission on Strategic Forces, said that “probably the least expensive and most survivable” alternative basing method would be the plan chosen by the Jimmy Carter Administration and abandoned by Reagan: mobile missiles that would be shuttled among 2,400 underground shelters.

Keep Soviets Guessing

While the location of the shelters would be known to Soviet military planners--just as the Minuteman silos’ locations are known--the shuttling of the missiles would keep the Soviets guessing about which shelter housed a missile at any given moment.

“I’d be surprised if anyone comes up with any brand-new invention,” Woolsey said. Moreover, Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), an influential figure in congressional consideration of military issues, added to the skepticism about the missile’s future by saying that he saw no “serious look for alternatives.”

But the Administration might opt for expensive “super-hardening to get whatever they can wring out of Congress in the next year,” suggested Richard K. Betts, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, an independent policy research organization.

10,000 to 11,000 Warheads

The Senate action, besides placing the basing issue at the center of the MX debate, raises the question of the importance that a limited number of MX missiles could play in nuclear warfare plans and deterrence.

Betts suggested that the 50 missiles, added to an arsenal estimated to contain 10,000 to 11,000 nuclear warheads, would offer an “imperceptible strategic gain.”

Because each 10-warhead missile would replace a three-warhead Minuteman, the net gain would be seven warheads per missile, for a total of 350 warheads. “An additional 350 is pretty trivial,” he said.

‘The Homeless Waif’

The Administration and Congress have long been frustrated by the difficulty of finding a protected basing method, and the search for a suitable system led Rep. Les Aspin (D-Wis.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, to dub the missile “the homeless waif of weapons.”

“At the last count, 34 different basing modes had been devised for the unloved MX,” he said in a speech last November. “We have considered dropping it out of planes, burying it thousands of feet underground, shuttling it around race tracks, even hiding it inside disguised beer trucks that would cruise the nation’s highways with studied innocence.”

Still, an Air Force officer, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that studies of methods to harden silos against highly accurate and powerful nuclear weapons “are developing techniques as we talk.” Deriving a new, feasible protection system is not out of the question, in his view.

Constituents’ Pressure

The officer said that the Administration’s difficulty in winning support for the MX stemmed from the pressure that constituents--concerned more about the budget deficit than about modernizing the nuclear missile force--were placing on members of Congress who normally favor Pentagon programs.

‘More Sensitive’

“For the first time, people know what the deficit is,” he said. “That’s making ‘our’ members of Congress more sensitive to it as well.”

But the 78-20 Senate vote Thursday night in favor of the deployment limit of 50--an additional number would be produced to provide spares and missiles for flight tests--also reflected a long decline in the weapon’s popularity. At each congressional vote, it has faced steadily growing opposition.

“The party is over in 1985,” declared Sen. Gary Hart (D-Colo.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and an MX opponent.

In the House, Rep. Nicholas Mavroules (D-Mass.) has proposed a 40-missile ceiling. An aide, Rudy Deleon, said there are votes to spare to pass the proposal and added: “That will end the MX program.”