Guided Missile

The MX project stays alive

It was a middle-of-the-night meeting that produced a winner's move. The day Congress rejected President Reagan's dense-pack basing proposal for the MX missile and withheld production funds for the weapon, Republican Senators William Cohen of Maine and Warren Rudman of New Hampshire huddled with White House Aide Kenneth Duberstein in a nocturnal conclave in Vice President Bush's Capitol Hill office to figure out what to do next. The Senators urged the Administration to appoint a high-powered bipartisan study commission. "The MX will never fly if it is a Republican missile," explained Cohen. "It's got to be bipartisan."

With that, the White House launched the eleven-member Commission on Strategic Forces, chaired by retired Air Force Lieut. General Brent Scowcroft. It followed up with a relentless five-month campaign to convert wavering Democrats and Republican moderates. The payoff came last week: a 239-to-186 House vote--which was the big test--then a 59-to-39 Senate vote to release $625 million in MX flight-testing and development money. It was a resounding political victory for Reagan. Exclaimed the President to Duberstein: "Fantastic job!"

Crucial to congressional endorsement was the Scowcroft Commission report released in April. The panel recommended the deployment of 100 MX missiles in existing Minuteman silos, implying that the ten-warhead launcher is a necessary lever in arms negotiations with the Soviets. But the commission linked MX development to arms control and proposed the deployment of smaller, mobile, single-warhead Midgetman missiles in the 1990s that would be less vulnerable to attack.

Reagan then set about reassuring skeptical Congressmen of his sincere interest in arms reductions. Three weeks ago, he sent two letters to Congress, promising to adhere to the commission's blueprint, including its recommendation that the U.S. proposal at the START talks in Geneva encourage a shift to smaller single-warhead missiles, which are considered less likely to provoke a hair-trigger showdown. Also included in the letters was a commitment to establish a permanent bipartisan advisory panel on arms control. The President further promised to incorporate into the START negotiations a congressional proposal: the so-called build-down, which would require that old warheads be destroyed as new ones are deployed by the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Reagan then did some nifty personal wooing, including placing some two dozen phone calls to legislators. And the night before the key House vote, he gave a White House dinner for 40 Congressmen, many of whom were undecided. In the end, the Administration received 34 votes for the MX from this group.

Despite last week's tactical triumph, the MX may still get shot down. Some congressional critics, who believe the MX accelerates the arms race, were more annoyed than assuaged by the rhetoric of the MX debate, which was so neatly wrapped in the mantle of arms limitation. By week's end, 19 Republican Senators who had sided with the President dispatched a bluntly worded letter reminding him of his promises and warning him not to take their support for granted. Indeed, last week's action was only the first test facing the MX, which has been the subject of eight years of study and has had 30 different basing schemes. Next week the House plans to vote on a bill to authorize $4.1 billion for MX production. Said one White House aide: "It's not locked up yet." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.