Next: Densetrack? Racepack?

A panel re-examines MX basing and the whole U.S. missile triad

In an attempt to revive the beleaguered MX missile in the new Congress, President Reagan last week named a blue, ribbon commission to study the issue and present him with recommendations by Feb. 18. Known formally as the Commission on Strategic Forces, the eleven-member panel has a broad mandate to examine the triad of land, sea and air weapons that make up the nation's nuclear deterrence system. "Nothing is ruled out," said retired Air Force General Brent Scowcroft, chairman of the group. "The commission has no kind of restriction on what it can and cannot do."

The panel could conceivably recommend scrapping the MX or scaling back other land-based systems. But this is unlikely, since the commission is top-heavy with military-policy specialists,* a number of whom, including Scowcroft, have publicly supported the MX. While difficult to protect from enemy attack, intercontinental ballistic missiles are more accurate and can deliver larger warheads than can sea-based missiles; they are also less vulnerable to Soviet air defenses than bombers.

The trickiest subject will be a basing mode for the MX, on which several commission members hold strong views. One of the panelists, former Carter Administration Defense Secretary Harold Brown, was the chief sponsor of the "racetrack" plan, which proposed continually shuttling 200 ICBMS along 10,000 miles of rails in and out of 4,600 shelters in Utah and Nevada in a kind of nuclear shell game. Commission Vice Chairman Thomas Reed, special assistant to the President on national security, is generally regarded as father of the Dense Pack plan, advocated by the Reagan Administration and defeated in the most recent session of Congress. The scheme envisions 100 MX missiles in superhardened silos clustered so close together that attacking Soviet missiles would disable each other trying to hit them.

Can the panel reach a consensus on the MX, which has already had more than 30 basing schemes shot down, in just six weeks? Said Scowcroft: "I'm not sure." The best guess among Pentagon officials and defense analysts in Washington is that the commission will recommend a compromise basing plan, combining Dense Pack and racetrack. Brown has already proposed adding 900 dummy silos to the Dense Pack plan to frustrate Soviet detection of the missiles.

Reagan must soon make a second--and perhaps more difficult--arms decision. When the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Force negotiations resume in Geneva on Jan. 27, Moscow negotiators are expected to formalize an offer, already publicly announced by Soviet Leader Yuri Andropov, to reduce missiles trained on Western Europe in exchange for a U.S. agreement to cancel deployment of Pershing II and cruise missiles there. The offer has been rejected informally by the U.S. and its allies as unbalanced in favor of the Soviets. But at week's end Reagan announced that he was sending Vice President George Bush to confer with the Western Europeans and the Vatican on the arms talks. The stakes are high. Not only will Reagan's approach affect relations with the Soviets, but it is bound to influence the European peace movement and ultimately ties with the allies.

*The commission's members include former New Jersey Senator Nicholas Brady; former Texas Governor William Clements, a Deputy Secretary of Defense under Presidents Nixon and Ford; M.I.T. Dean of Science John Deutch; former Secretary of State Alexander Haig; former CIA Director Richard Helms; John Lyons, chairman of the defense subcommittee of the executive council of the AFL-CIO; Vice Admiral Levering Smith, former director of special projects for the Navy; and former Under Secretary of the Navy R. James Woolsey. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.