Taking Aim at Midgetman

As we read President Reagan’s budget, the Pentagon wants to increase the research and development budget for the small Midgetman missile by 130%. It is quite clear, however, that the Defense Department is playing a peculiar game aimed at sabotaging the Midgetman program in order to clear the way for congressional approval of more big MX missiles.

Donald A. Hicks, undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, told the House Armed Services Committee this week that he favors doubling the size of the Midgetman missile, and arming it with three warheads instead of one. He insisted that he was speaking only for himself, but if we believed that we would also have to believe that the earth is flat.

Understanding the game that is being played starts with understanding the political and strategic relationship between MX and Midgetman.

Since the days of the Carter Administration, the Pentagon has been properly worried by the increasing ability of the Soviet Union to destroy U.S. land-based missiles in a surprise attack. Because the original MX concept was to keep moving it around and therefore give it a better chance of surviving such an attack, the ten-warhead missile was the Pentagon’s chosen response.

Arms control specialists, however, are not comfortable with the way MX turned out because it combines the worst of all worlds: it looks very threatening to the Soviets, but is itself very vulnerable to surprise attack because it is to be put into fixed silos. That sort of deployment could virtually invite the Soviets to beat the United States to the punch with a preemptive strike.

Efforts to make the missile less vulnerable my giving it the mobility of a pea in a shell game failed because of local political opposition to the presence of the big missiles. Sober-minded people both in Congress and the defense community decided that the best answer was to scatter around enough small, mobile, single-warhead missiles that an attacker could launch most of his missiles and still not be sure how many Midgetmen they would hit. That would deter an attack. The small one-warhead missiles also would be less threatening to an adversary and therefore less likely to provoke a preemptive attack. From that theoretical construct, which we have always found quite valid, came the Midgetman missile project.

But the Air Force has never been enthusiastic about the Midgetman. It would much prefer to have 50 or more MX missiles in addition to the 50 already approved by Congress. Privately, high-ranking defense officials have suggested that the Midgetman project is expendable.

If Congress chose a three-warhead Midgetman, it would also be choosing to make it more threatening and less mobile. That would mean discarding the strongest argument in its favor--the deterrence aspect.

Hicks says the shift would save some $20 billion, and maybe it would. But the important question that Congress and the American people must answer is whether the goal is to save money or avoid nuclear war. The MX missile would not make nuclear war less likely; the Midgetman would. We urge Congress to keep that fact in mind.