Aspin Urges More Funds for Midgetman Missile

The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee on Sunday endorsed increased spending on the Midgetman missile, describing it as a “rare kind of weapon that should garner support from liberals and conservatives alike.”

Rep. Les Aspin (D-Wis.), a longtime advocate of the Midgetman, released a report by his committee’s staff that found the mobile, single-warhead intercontinental ballistic missile to be a cost-effective competitor to the 10-warhead MX. Congress has authorized deployment of 50 MX missiles and initial funding for a successor weapon popularly dubbed Midgetman.

Aspin voiced concern in his statement about the Reagan Administration’s “ambivalence” toward a funding increase for Midgetman. Although President Reagan asked in the 1987 budget he submitted last week that the authorization for the missile be increased to $1.4 billion from $700 million, Aspin said, arms reduction negotiators at Geneva have “offered to trade Midgetman away.”

Conservatives should support Midgetman, Aspin said, because its mobility would make it a costly weapon for an enemy to eliminate. “A wide variety of scenarios” indicates, he said, that it would require a barrage of from three to 17 Soviet ICBMs to knock out one mobile Midgetman, and thus it “provides real deterrence.”

Midgetman should attract liberals, Aspin continued, as an ICBM that “cannot be a first-strike weapon” because “the mathematics of nuclear exchanges decrees that you must fire at least two warheads at each of the other guy’s missiles to have good confidence that you can destroy the missile.”

The staff report found that Midgetman “makes a significant contribution to closing the window of ICBM vulnerability” because so many enemy warheads would be required to assure its destruction. But it concluded also that “Midgetman will be an expensive system,” estimating its cost at $44.5 billion over more than 20 years of research, development, procurement and operation, which is scheduled to begin in 1992.