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With or without SALT II, America's nuclear deterrent must be made less vulnerable to Soviet attack.
As part of its effort to make SALT II politically palatable, the Carter Administration ordered the development of the mobile MX, a ten-warhead successor to the three-warhead Minuteman, which would move around in a giant shell game to foil Soviet targeting. The trouble with MX is its mobile-basing mode. The system is hugely expensive (possibly as much as $100 billion) and terribly destructive of both the natural and social environment in which it would exist. More troublesome still are its military ramifications. If the U.S. goes ahead with a mobile MX, the Soviets may try to disguise the location of their big missiles. Additional uncertainty about the monitoring of Soviet missiles would compound American anxieties about the vulnerability of the U.S. land-based missile system.
There are cheaper, more sensible alternatives. One would be a stationary MX. Because the missile has more warheads than the Minuteman, fewer would have to survive a surprise attack for the U.S. to retaliate with "assured destruction" of Soviet military targets. Another possibility is to rely more on submarines, which are virtually invulnerable to pre-emptive strikes, and on aircraft (including perhaps a new supersonic bomber), which can scramble quickly the moment that the U.S. appears to be under attack. Because of improvements in satellite-guidance systems for submarine-launched ballistic missiles and in the technology of slow, low-flying, hard-to-detect and exceedingly accurate cruise missiles, the U.S. is approaching the point where it need not rely quite so much on its land-based missiles in order to maintain a credible deterrent.
As yet another option for protecting American ICBMS, the U.S. could resurrect and expand an antiballistic missile (ABM) system. The 1972 treaty limiting ABMs—the only strategic arms limitation agreement that is still formally in force—might be renegotiated so as to permit selective ABM protection of U.S. missile silos. Tampering with the present ABM treaty, however, should be considered strictly as a last resort. If such renegotiation of the 1972 treaty failed, the result might be an ABM race. That would surely accelerate the ICBM competition. It is only logical that more and better offensive weapons would be necessary to penetrate more and better defenses. It would also increase the hair-trigger mentality on both sides.
I he U.S. must narrow the Soviet lead in medium-range nuclear weapons and in conventional forces.
These are gaps of potential utility to the Kremlin in crises far easier to imagine than a direct Soviet-American nuclear showdown. The Soviets' 3-to-l superiority in tactical nuclear weapons in Europe could help the Kremlin bluff and bully the West Europeans. Therefore the U.S. should devote more of its strained defense budget to improving the ability of America's allies to counter a new generation of mobile Soviet missiles.
In purely military terms, it would make sense to consider development of the neutron bomb. Opponents of this highly effective