Air Force Offers to Cancel MX Missiles on Rail Cars

The Air Force, under pressure to reduce its budget, has proposed to cancel its plans to deploy MX missiles aboard rail cars and to slow development of Midgetman, a small single-warhead mobile missile, Pentagon sources said Monday.

Citing changes in the Soviet strategic threat as well as looming budget constraints, the Air Force’s senior officials have urged Defense Secretary Dick Cheney to shift the weight of the nation’s nuclear deterrent force instead to bombers and submarine-launched missiles, sources said.

While proposing to abandon the rail-based mobile missile, the Air Force called for proceeding with production of a B-2 bomber force, defense officials said. But in an eleventh-hour effort to save the costly B-2 program, which is under fierce attack in Congress, the service proposed to scale production of the B-2 to as few as 65 aircraft. The Air Force previously had sought 132 of the planes, which are built in Southern California.

The latest proposals, forwarded to Cheney last Friday by Air Force Secretary Donald B. Rice, come as the military services maneuver to fit their spending priorities into budgets that will shrink by at least 2% annually for the next five years. If approved by Cheney and the White House, the cutback of land-based missiles would represent a significant shift away from the Bush Administration’s policy of modernizing the nation’s nuclear arsenal on all fronts.

Such a move also could set the stage for further superpower negotiations aimed at banning mobile missiles carrying more than one warhead. The initiative continues to have strong backing in the White House and on Capitol Hill.

The proposal to terminate the so-called “rail-garrison peacekeeper” program and to proceed slowly with production of the Midgetman could save as much as $15 billion, one official said. Instead of traversing the nation’s rail system in specially built rail cars, the 10-warhead MX missile would be left in silos originally built to house older missiles with fewer warheads.

A decision to defer the modernization of land-based missiles would likely strengthen the position of those who favor production of the B-2, officials said.

Under the Air Force plan, the single-warhead Midgetman missile would not come off production lines in large numbers before the next century. Instead of scooting around the Western states on trucks as originally planned, the proposed force of 500 Midgetman missiles would replace the MX missile in silos scattered across Wyoming and Nebraska.

As part of the recommended program changes, the Air Force would delete a request for more than $2 billion that Cheney proposed to spend on procurement of rail cars for the MX missiles in the year beginning Oct. 1, 1990.

“This is the old competition (in the Air Force) between intercontinental ballistic missiles and bombers, and the service has consistently tried to play down ICBMs,” said one Pentagon official of the package of Air Force recommendations. “At some levels, this is a done deal,” the official added.

But defense officials said the Air Force plan is certain to face some resistance from Cheney and some of his top Pentagon advisers, who have argued that the United States must respond to the Soviets’ continuing strategic nuclear modernization with an aggressive nuclear building program of its own.

But despite Cheney’s public calls for more spending on nuclear weapons, he has told the military services in internal planning documents that budgets for long-range nuclear weapons will fall by 3% to 5% annually over the next five years. Cheney slated the Air Force for particularly steep declines during that period.

The defense secretary is scheduled to tell House and Senate committees on Thursday that he will recommend continued production of the B-2 bomber in the wake of a comprehensive review of the B-2 and three other major aircraft programs. But sources said that Cheney is likely to adopt in some form the Air Force’s proposal to scale production back.

In a bid to save the embattled B-2 program from termination at Congress’s hands, sources said that the Air Force recently urged Cheney to approve the production of five B-2 bombers a year for the next five-to-10 years.

The result would be a B-2 bomber force of between 65 and 90 aircraft. The Air Force plan also would mean a significant reduction in planned growth for the plane’s principal manufacturer, the Northrop Corp., which currently is planning to steadily increase the pace of production to reach an annual rate of 30 aircraft by 1995.

While the proposal would increase the cost of each aircraft beyond its current $570-million price tag, since many costs are fixed regardless of the number of aircraft built, the Air Force has reckoned that such a plan would keep yearly spending on the program below $8 billion. Congress has balked at the prospect of approving as much as $9 billion for the program in a single year.

The Air Force’s plans to modernize the bomber force with the B-2 bomber while still fielding two new land-based nuclear missiles has long been controversial on Capitol Hill. But lawmakers’ calls for the cancellation or curtailment of such weapons have escalated since Eastern Europe has defected from the Soviet Bloc and relations between Moscow and Washington have warmed.

Officials noted that the Air Force plan for slowed missile modernization closely resembles a package of proposals advanced by Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Nunn, who is likely to play a key role in shaping the defense budgets of the coming years, first proposed negotiating a ban on multiple-warhead mobile missiles and suggested recently that the Midgetman could be housed safely in fixed silos built for the older missile force.