Dense Pack Gets Blasted In a rebuke to Reagan, the House says no to the complex MX basing system
The House is Washington's home for hawks. What the Pentagon wants, the House normally gives it—and sometimes more. But last week, by a surprisingly decisive margin of 69 votes, the House refused to give Ronald Reagan something the President had insisted, with all the persuasive flourishes of his best prime-time TV oratory, that America urgently needs to counter the Soviet Union's threatening nuclear arsenal: money to begin production of the 96-ton MX missile with its ten-warhead punch.
The stunning rejection of a President's wishes on a major national security issue drew an uncharacteristically bitter reaction from Reagan. "I had hoped that most of the members in the House had awakened to the threat facing the United States," he said. "That hope was apparently unfounded. A majority chose to go sleepwalking into the future."
Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger warned the Senate Armed Services Committee that if the Senate too blocks MX production funds, the U.S. would be "telling the world we are disarming unilaterally." Edward Rowny, the chief U.S. negotiator in the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks with the Soviet Union in Geneva, predicted that without the MX, the U.S. will find it "extremely difficult" to achieve a START agreement. Secretary of State George Shultz, attending NATO and trade meetings in Brussels, struggled to convince the allies that resistance to the MX in the U.S. is not quite the same as resistance in some Western European nations to positioning nuclear-tipped Pershing II and cruise missiles on their soil as scheduled for next year. "We have 1,000 long-range land-based Minutemen throughout the West," Shultz emphasized. The MX, he said, is just "a modernization of that system."
The Administration stumbled on the MX missile's most glaring weakness: after more than eight years of study, the expenditure of $4.5 billion on the missile and consideration of some 30 options, the Pentagon still lacks a politically acceptable and scientifically credible basing mode for its sophisticated bird. Reagan, Weinberger and a flurry of military papers and briefings had all failed in the rush to sell Dense Pack, the basing plan that would plant 100 of the 71-ft.-tall missiles in a 21-sq.-mi. strip of Wyoming, 14 miles long by 1.5 miles wide. Proponents argued that because the missiles would be clustered so closely, incoming Soviet rockets theoretically would destroy one another, and superhardened silos would protect most of the MX missiles from destruction. The survivors would then rise to retaliate, knocking out any Soviet intercontinental missiles still in their silos.