Doubts Cloud Cheney Plan to Base MX Missile on Rails

It is a proposal as irrepressible as the children’s classic “The Little Engine That Could.” And critics say it is just about as realistic.

The United States, or so the proposal goes, should hide its land-based nuclear missiles inside cleverly disguised railroad cars, keep them in garrisons during peacetime and send them out to roam the nation’s railroads in times of superpower crisis. Mingling unobtrusively with commercial traffic, the missile force would remain safe from Soviet attack and ready to do its deadly business at a moment’s notice.

Defense Secretary Dick Cheney asked Congress on Tuesday for a fiscal 1990 defense budget that includes initial funds for moving the nation’s 50 MX missiles from their fixed silos to rail cars. But there are a few “ifs” in his plan.

The system will work if U.S. leaders see a Soviet strike coming in time and give the order to trains to leave their vulnerable garrisons; if the trains have the run of the nation’s 150,000 miles of tracks unhindered by sabotage, accidents or the punishing electrical effects of nuclear warfare, and if the Soviets cannot pinpoint the locations of the trains by unmasking their disguises or tapping into the easily accessible network of commercial rail operations.

“The problem with the MX rail-garrison plan is that rather than taking minutes to mobilize, it takes a matter of hours,” Rep. Norman D. Dicks (D-Wash.) said. “The concern is that it gives the Soviets incentive to launch a surprise attack . . . while the missiles are still in the garrison, where they can be destroyed before they get out on the tracks.”

Transferring the MX to rail cars also has a lot of things going for it, not the least of which is price.

At about $5.4 billion, the cost of putting the MX on the rails is less than a quarter of the cost of the chief competing proposal--the development and deployment of a whole new missile called the Midgetman, which would be mounted on trucks and ride the nation’s highways.

The 50 MX missiles, with 10 nuclear warheads each, already exist. The proposed 500 single-warhead Midgetman missiles would have to be built from scratch.

Cheney, facing a need to trim the defense budget he inherited from the Ronald Reagan Administration, recommended scrapping Midgetman development in favor of basing the MX on the rails.

He faced opposition not only from influential Democratic congressmen such as Dicks, who have championed the Midgetman, but also from Brent Scowcroft, President Bush’s national security adviser, who headed the 1983 presidential commission that first proposed the Midgetman.

Consequently, Bush finessed the decision by choosing both missile systems, although he will ask only for money to develop--not yet to deploy--the Midgetman.

This is not the first time that the nation has seriously considered putting its land-based nuclear missile force on the rails. When a similar scheme was considered for the Minuteman missile in the early 1960s, it so fired the nation’s imagination that the Lionel Train Corp. began producing a miniature boxcar whose roof opened up to allow a model Minuteman missile to pop off in a mock launch.

Lionel stopped building the tiny missile train in 1963, after the Pentagon rejected the rail-basing scheme and decided to put the Minuteman in underground silos. One Lionel employee, citing concern for safety in today’s toy market, said recently: “You could never sell that kind of thing these days.”

But that is exactly what Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Larry D. Welch, who calls the rail-garrison scheme “mobility at a comparatively bargain price,” has succeeded in doing for the MX.

The Air Force has identified 10 bases, from Louisiana to Washington, where MX missiles could be housed in garrisons along rail tracks and scrambled onto rail cars in time of crisis. As examples of periods in history that probably would have sent the missiles onto the commercial railways, the Air Force cites the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and the 1973 war between Egypt and Israel.

Opponents of the rail-garrison scheme charge that the return on the $5.4-billion investment would be a less stable balance of nuclear terror. The Soviet Union, they say, would recognize that only a Pearl-Harbor style attack would remove the threat posed by the MX missile force’s 500 accurate warheads while they were still housed in their vulnerable garrisons.

Survivability Stressed

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Prof. John Deutch says the best way to deter a surprise Soviet attack is to maintain a U.S. force that would survive such an assault and be available for retaliation.

“The rail-garrison MX system doesn’t demonstrate that property of survivability unless it has strategic warning--hours as opposed to minutes,” Deutch said. “As a result, it makes the possibility (of a surprise attack) more likely, not less likely.”

Deutch was a leading member of the 1983 Scowcroft commission, which not only proposed the Midgetman missile, but also called on the Pentagon to find a basing system for the MX that would protect it from a Soviet strike. More recently, Deutch has been a member of a senior Pentagon advisory group that concluded that the rail-garrison scheme would remain invulnerable only if part of the missile force were kept in motion around the clock.

A surprise attack, however, would deprive the Air Force of the roughly six hours’ notice it needs to disperse the trains. Caught inside their garrisons, the MX missiles would be easy prey, critics say.

By one estimate published in the Harvard University quarterly journal International Security, the equivalent of a single 10-warhead Soviet S-18 missile could destroy all 50 MX missiles if it caught them in their garrisons.

But Welch argues that even with the MX missiles in their rail-side garrisons, there are powerful forces--notably the nation’s 423 nuclear bombers and 35 nuclear submarines--to deter a Soviet sneak attack. Large portions of those forces, each of which was greatly boosted in power and accuracy during the Reagan Administration’s military buildup, could respond to an attack with only minutes’ warning, Welch said.

“We ought to take credit for what we got for our investment in strategic modernization,” he said. “There has already been a very significant improvement in the retaliatory capability of day-to-day alert forces.”

Others charge that the Air Force has not accounted adequately for factors that would prevent the missile-bearing trains from safely riding the rails.

About 5 pounds of conventional explosives, carried easily in the backpack of a protester or a Soviet-backed saboteur, could render a rail line impassable and impede the dispersal of the trains.

The trains could also be stopped in their tracks by a phenomenon known as electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, a crippling electrical charge released by the explosion of nuclear weapons. Although the trains themselves would be designed to withstand such a force, experts say a nuclear explosion would cause a major failure of the highly centralized control and dispatch systems and stop commercial trains dead in their tracks, littering the lines with obstacles.

“The threat of EMP attacks on the commercial rail system is a major concern,” wrote Barry E. Fridling, an analyst at the Pentagon-funded Institute for Defense Analysis, and Lawrence Livermore Laboratory’s John R. Harvey in International Security magazine. “If this problem is not solved, the system could not be deployed.”

The Air Force recognizes the problems but believes that they are not crippling. And it is not concerned that the nation’s aging railroad right-of-way is too weak to carry trains laden with heavy and delicate nuclear missiles.

“The Air Force is not going to dispatch them on rails that won’t support them,” an Air Force spokesman said. “There are tens of thousands of miles of track strong enough to accommodate the (MX) trains.”

Trains Might Be Located

Finally, experts fear that the Soviets could exploit the growing centralization of the railways’ dispatching system to pinpoint the strategic missile trains. Though they are to be painted like boxcars of major U.S. rail companies, the cars’ distinctive eight-axle design, necessary to carry the weight and girth of the 10-warhead missile, might give them away.

Moreover, during the rare occasions when they would be riding the rails, the MX missiles would demand priority over all other traffic, Air Force experts say. Trains operating under such instructions could be recognizable to a national network of railroad buffs and to civilian train dispatchers. Moreover, their increasingly computerized dispatching networks could become a target for Soviet computer break-ins, one independent expert said.

On Dec. 7 of last year, a secret Air Force test aimed to put such fears to rest, according to Air Force documents obtained by The Times. The Strategic Air Command, which would operate the rail-garrison system, played hide-and-seek with its own intelligence experts, running a set of disguised mock-missile trains throughout the Pacific Northwest.

Not only did the movements of the empty missile cars arouse no interest among railroad buffs, but also the team of Air Force intelligence experts was unable to locate the cars.

“Rail garrison is here; it’s affordable and practical,” SAC Commander Gen. John T. Chain Jr. wrote in a Jan. 26 letter to Sen. Pete Wilson (R-Calif.).