I must admit I was too young to pay attention to U.S. defense policy when the whole MX Missile controversy was roiling. What was the big deal? What was the missile all about in the first place? I thought it was just your basic ICBM (…which is nothing new for our arsenal). Am I missing something?
Ah, those were the days…
Mo Udall’s speech. Arizona, of course, was top of the list for hosting the things.
http://www.library.arizona.edu/branches/spc/udall/missiles_htm.html
A brief history.
http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/usa/icbm/lgm-118.htm
An outline of the thingie itself.
http://www.library.arizona.edu/branches/spc/udall/fyi/790718.html
IIRC, the main quibbles were:
–it would cost like forty-eleven billion gazillion dollars.
–nobody could decide HOW it should work. Dig a trench? Build a silo? What?
–did we really NEED the world’s biggest land-based guided missile? We already had the capacity to destroy the whole world a couple dozen times. To which Reagan responded, “It’s okay, we’ll just call it a ‘Peacekeeper’.”
All the DOD knew was that it wanted to build a really really really BIG land-based missile, because “it was there”.
Oops, I left out:
Reagan, when he came in, put the kibosh on the world’s biggest land-based missile because he was all for “Star Wars”, the eye-in-the-sky “let’s shoot them with laser beams!” approach.
Duck Duck Goose has covered the major objections that I know of: cost, necessity, and uncertainty that it would actually perform as desired.
The idea behind the MX was that it would be transportable from one launching site to another, and would constantly be switched around. The great fear of U.S. strategic planners was that a Soviet first strike would eventually become capable of eliminating our ground-based missiles and bombers, thus destroying our ability to strike back and removing a major deterrent against the Soviets’ initiating a nuclear war. Thus the MX missile, of whose location the Soviets could never be sure because we would always be shipping them from one place to another.
Critics pointed out that the Soviets could not eliminate our submarine-launched missiles, and they considered this alone to be an adequate deterrent. As Duck’s links show, there was also much difficulty constructing adequate launch platforms for the missiles, which threw a monkey wrench into the whole mobile missile concept.
IIRC the trick of the MX missile was that it was portable. remember it had to be counted(seen) by the soviet satelites at certain times then it would race along to some other spot. the point was we only have this many missiles and they are not targetable. so we fit in the limitation treaty and felt safe that Russia could not take them out with the first wave.
it shows the level of secrecy we have (or lack of it) that we couldn’t just mount one on a unused railroad track in the middle of arizona and have it do a big loop all the time. and have different stations setup to launch it. we couldn’t hit the side of a barn with such a simple launch site and we couldnt keep the ruskies from finding that out.
guess that level of security is still a problem today.