HOW DID YOU FIRST HEAR ABOUT THE MX MISSILE PLANS?

I was then working as the chief of staff to Senator Tom McIntyre, from New Hampshire, who was Chairman of the Military Research and Development subcommittee. And one of the things that we did with him was to review all of the proposals that all of the services forwarded to the Congress for new weapons systems. That was the prime place where the Congress did that work. That's where I first heard about it. It would have been about 1974. The MX was then not called the MX. It was called the Advanced ICBM Technologies Program, or something like that. And this was the way it was normally done. The first time I heard about the MX was in 1976 when for the first time it was called that in a programmatic request from the Air Force to the Congress.

WHAT DID THE AIR FORCE ASK MONEY FOR?

Here's the way a system of this sort is developed and proposed to the Congress. You have a level of development in which you have components that are advanced technology and...

ASKS FOR MORE CONCISE ANSWER.

In 1976 the Air Force asked for about $78 million to begin to develop a, an MX missile. I would say that 3/4 of that money or more was just for the missile. There was very little money spent to design a basing system. And at that time the Air Force was primarily inventing the next generation of land-based missile.

ASKS THE REACTION OF MCINTYRE'S COMMITTEE.

Well we had been on this case for a couple of years before that as the Air Force had come in and asked for the component technology. So we knew it was coming and we studied it very carefully. The problem the Air Force and the Administration had was that just at the time that they were asking for these monies, the President came in, this was President Ford, in a presidential election year, in April of 1976, came in and asked for a half a billion dollars. I'm sorry, a third of a billion dollars. For 50 new Minuteman III missiles, which was the previous generation. So our committee looked at that and said, now wait a minute. If you're so, if you're so concerned, about the survivability of the current missile, the Minuteman III, that you want to move that quickly to the MX, then why are you asking for half a, or a third of billion dollars more for 50, 50 new Minuteman III missiles. They're either obsolete or they aren't. If they're obsolete we shouldn't be spending that money for new ones. So, they said, it's clear that the President does not think the problem is so pressing that we can't take the time to sort this out. The committee then cut that proposal by about 40 percent and asked a set of questions of the President. Now this was a... this point in 1976 was a crucial stage in the whole, in the whole development of the MX and how the country looked at it. And it went like this. At that time, no one could tell the Congress why we wanted to do what they were asking to do. Was it primarily because we thought our missiles were survivable and you needed a new survivably based missile? Or was it that we wanted a new missile that could do better and more what our current missiles then, the Minuteman IIIs, were doing. In other words, to be able to attack the Russian missile force and to kill it. Since no one could really tell us that clearly, the committee took the position that we'll cut the proposal by enough to get their attention. And then we'll ask explicitly, as part of the legislative history, the President of the United States to clear this up. And it was the committee's conviction, in fact it was the Congress' conviction, that if we were going to proceed to do something this important, that we ought to know why we were doing what was being proposed to be funded. And that was the beginning in 1976 of the debates that lasted then for eight or nine years.

ASKS FOR MORE CONCISE ANSWER

In 1976 when the Air Force first asked for monies dedicated to the MX, it was about $78 million, the committee looked at this and said, "No one, on behalf of the executive branch, from the President on down, can explain why we should proceed as we're being asked to proceed. "One potential explanation was that we wanted a new missile in order to fight and win a so-called limited nuclear war. In which we would knock out their missile silos and we would knock out theirs and we would have enough of that capability to do it. The other theory was that since the Soviets were, some people thought, getting the ability to attack our silos, we needed to be able to base survivable our own. So, since the MX program was both a missile and a basing scheme, we thought this ought to be sorted out. Which was the most crucial part of it? Or were both of them? So the committee said...cut the request by, I don't know, 40 percent, enough to get the executive branch's attention, and say "Would you please.." and asked explicitly as part of the legislative record, that the President of the United States review this and say what it was he wanted us to do. Why did he want us to buy an MX system? Was it to make the missile safer against a Soviet attack? Or was it to be able to attack theirs or both? And that's what happened in 1976. It set up the debate for the next eight years.

WHAT DID THE PRESIDENT SAY?

Let me say one other thing...The committee took the position at the time, in fact both the House and the Senate committees, the Congress of the United States took the position that the only reason we should proceed with the MX was to ensure the survivability of our missile force. They made an explicit statement that they were not interested in proceeding with the MX in order to attack the Soviet missile force, unless our own was survivable. So they asked the President to clear it up but the Congress took its own position which is proper under Article I of the Constitution.

WHY WAS CONGRESS ONLY INTERESTED IN SURVIVABILITY, NOT IN MAKING IT ACCURATE?

I think the sense was, is that if we had a problem, this was the problem. In other words, there was, there had been a thorough debate in '74 and '75, at least in the Senate. About the basic doctrine or the policy that the country should adopt. You see, the fundamental question underlying the MX in so many of these debates, is the question is almost never addressed, and that is, "What is the purpose of nuclear weapons? Why do we have these things?" Well, it's easy to say well, we want to deter the Soviets from attacking us but that's, that's true, but it's not enough to make clear that the most dangerous and, and missing part of the debate is the link between an explicit purpose, and explicit answer to the question why we have these weapons, and a particular program, in this case the MX, that we're being requested.

WHAT ABOUT MX SHARPENED THIS QUESTION?

For the first time the MX was defined to the Congress in classified reports as having, in a way that made it clear that the missile would have the ability to attack the Soviet silos with all of their hardness and concrete and steel, and to be able efficiently to destroy them. For the first time it was clear, explicitly, that the MX was a missile that was being designed to fight and win a counterforce, so-called limited nuclear war.

FIRST TIME A NUCLEAR WEAPON WAS DESIGNED TO DO THIS? OR THE MX?

It was the first time we had a weapon being proposed that could do that effectively.

ASKS FOR EXPANDED ANSWER

It was the first time that, that a weapon had been proposed to the Congress that could effectively take out, destroy, Soviet missiles in their silos. It was the first time it had been proposed to the Congress. That we buy a weapon that would have the practical purpose and effectiveness to destroy the missile, the Soviet missile force in their silos. And remember that most of the Soviet force then and now were in their land-based missiles.

CONGRESS FOUND THIS AN ALARMING IDEA?

There had been a thorough debate within the, within the Senate, in 1974 and '75 about whether we ought to adopt a so-called counterforce doctrine. That is, a policy that would have explicitly said that it is our purpose to be able to attack the Soviet missiles in their silos as some Americans thought the Soviets were planning to attack our missiles in our silos. Now if you have a problem of that sort, as many people were beginning to think that we were, we were going to have, that is, what later became known as the window of vulnerability, in which the Soviets could ....

ASKS SCHLESINGER'S ROLE IN DEBATE.

There had been, there had been a major debate in the Senate in '74 and '75, on the primary question of why we have nuclear weapons, particularly why we have land-based...versions of nuclear weapons. The classical view that the country had, for the most part, had a consensus, was that the only reasons we had these was to deter a Soviet attack. There was another school often identified with Secretary Jim Schlesinger who had just come into office, and that view as usually, usually understood as saying, well, in addition to wanting to deter the Soviets, what we had to do was be able to do what we feared they were doing, preparing to do. Namely, to attack their missiles in their silos. In other words, to begin to prepare to fight a limited nuclear war, a so-called counterforce war.

QUOTES SCHLESINGER--THAT OUR NUCLEAR GUARANTEE OF EUROPE WAS NOT CREDIBLE UNLESS MORE WAS INVOLVED THAN SACRIFICING CITIES.

Well there was a lot of confusion about what in fact our forces were designed to do and what they could do. In fact, in the 1970s, after a thorough review by President Nixon and his Administration, there was a targeting guidance that made it clear, I'm talking about the people who were actually responsible for targeting weapons and pointing them at certain targets and destroy them as part of our nuclear policy. It was clear that our policy at the time enabled the President to attack a whole, a whole variety of Soviet targets. Not just cities. In fact, there was no... at no time then nor now do we attack Soviet cities or population as such. The primary target then and now was so-called military industrial targets, those factories and other kinds of installations that would enable the Soviet Union if we got into a war to continue to wage that war. So the point is that the public debate missed that. There was never a choice then nor is there now, even though someone like Dr. Brzezinski who served Carter and some other people who simply were ignorant of this...

WHAT IS WRONG WITH DEVELOPING A MISSILE THAT CAN BE SELECTIVELY TARGETED ON NON-CIVILIAN POPULATIONS?

People who oppose counterforce weapons such as the MX took the position that if we would, had the ability in being to threaten the Soviet land-based force where most of their missiles existed, then in a time of crisis this would put a hair trigger on nuclear war. It would mean that if they thought something had, they saw something on the radar, that looked like a missile force in the middle of a, of tense times, they might then loose their own missiles out of the fear that they would either have to use them or lose them. In other words... so what, what many people agreed upon, people including Paul Nitze at the time, and those of us who also were worried about the problem of the Soviet threat to our missiles or the presumed threat, what we said, instead of trying to build a missile to attack their forces, let's instead concentrate on the issue of survivability. How do we make sure that our missiles will be able to survive the worst kind of an attack that they might be tempted to mount on ours? And so when you, in 1976, when we first came to grips with the MX, the issue of whether we ought to build it in order to make our own missile force survivable, which then put the emphasis on the basing scheme, or whether we ought to build it in order to threaten their missiles and in the judgment of many people, lead us to a hair trigger on both sides, was at the crux of the matter. And the Congress took the position, at least those who were engaged in the issue, that the only primary reason that we would build the MX, or should pursue it, it was an early stage, was to ensure the survivability of our own forces which would be in our interest but which would not put the, which would avoid threatening the Soviet's own forces at the same time. It would give us a more stable set of forces facing each other.

HOW COULD WE HAVE A CREDIBLE DETERRENT THEN, A FIRST USE TO PROTECT EUROPE? WITHOUT TRIGGERING A MASSIVE ASSURED DESTRUCTION?

The United States had then and does now a mix of forces, of strategic forces. We have a formidable force at sea on our submarines, a very formidable on our bombers which at that time included primarily bombers and so-called short-range attack missiles. And we also had a formidable force, as we do now, in our, in our own land-based missiles. We had a so-called triad of, of forces. By the way that gave us more different ways of, of surviving an attack that we might fear from the Soviets than the Soviets had in an, in a, the kind of attack they might fear we would mount on them. Because most of their forces were in land-based missiles, and which were targetable. So the point is, if the, if the primary concern was, would we have enough survivable forces in the worst case to retaliate against the Soviet Union if they had attacked us, enough varied, strategic nuclear forces, we clearly had these three kinds of forces and that was, that gave us a credible, redundant survivable deterrent. Part of the problem about the debate as it developed, after '76, was that the debate concentrated almost entirely on the, on the land-based missile. And there were people who who would almost dismiss the forces we had at sea, or for that matter on bombers. In fact, it crept into the language. I remember people talking about this in a committee room and they'd say, well, the kind of missile force we have at sea, will deliver only 60 KT which in, which is nuke speak for 60, the equivalent of 60 thousand tons of TNT, a bomb that would be five or six times the force of what was dropped on Nagasaki. And because it was not a big yield, a big burst, they'd say, well it's only 60 KT. Dismissing it as if it were nothing. We have, most of our forces at sea have, have that capability. So my point is, as the debate developed in the ten years after 1976 or so, this, this... it focused almost entirely on the qualities that, that could be achieved only on land-based forces. That is something that is going to be, that can attack Soviet forces quickly, within a half an hour, that would be accurate enough to take out their silos, and which would have a big enough blast to take out their silos. And all the rest of our forces seem to be devalued in the conversation. This was all under the so-called title of the window of vulnerability which was almost entirely about, an argument about land-based missiles.

WHY WAS SENATOR MCINTYRE SCARED OF INCREASING OUR ACCURACY?

Sen. McIntyre, those of us who were working with him, felt that first of all the country ought to decide what kind of nuclear policy we wanted. We should decide what the primary purpose of these nuclear weapons should be. And then we ought to buy weapons that would fit and carry out that policy. Not the other way around. In other words, just because you can invent something didn't mean it was a good thing to have. In fact, if you have bought in...if you had bought certain kinds of weapons of sufficient accuracy and blast yield, as they call it, in combinations that would enable you to destroy a Soviet missile in a large hardened target, silo, no matter what you called it, if you had enough of them, it would amount to a counterforce war-fighting doctrine, or policy. In other words if it walked like a duck and talked like a duck and looked like a duck, it was going to be a duck in terms of war-fighting policy no matter what you said. And so the first point that Senator McIntyre and others of us who argued this case contended was that in a free country we ought to decide together what it is we want to do and then buy the technologies that would carry that out. Not the other way around. The second thing... I'm sorry. There was another reason why, why Senator McIntyre and those of us who worked with him felt that a so-called counterforce policy, or war fighting policy would be dangerous. And it was just simply this. That if we ever got into a crisis between the two superpowers, in which the men, and they're almost entirely men, would be in positions of decision, they would be tired, they would be anxious, they, they would be under enormous stress. And if at that time the two forces on each side which faced each other were seen by all sides as having the capacity to take out the other, it means that you could put a hair trigger on nuclear war. And the number one purpose of nuclear weapons in my judgment should be to prevent the use of even one nuclear weapon. So that if you believe that, I mean I'm talking about what is in the supreme national interest, it is to prevent the use of even one nuclear weapon. And a counterforce, warfighting technology and force would make it, would endanger that policy by making it more likely that one of these things could be used.

ASKS HIM TO CONSIDER ARGUMENT THAT WE NEEDED TO HAVE A FIRST USE CAPABILITY TO PROTECT EUROPE EFFECTIVELY, TO DETER AGGRESSION. POINTS UP CONFLICT BETWEEN THAT AND HIS CONTENTIONS.

We must always keep separate in our minds as we talk about this. The nuclear weapons that we have developed and put in Europe, then and now, for the purpose of ensuring that we could deter, certainly a nuclear attack against Europe from the Soviet Union, but also it was our stated policy then and has been until this new treaty come about, that we use these nuclear weapons in Europe to deter a conventional attack against Europe. But in general that was a, that was a separate discussion from the one we're, we're talking about when we, when we review the history of the MX. The MX was a classic weapon for intercontinental strategic purposes and the policies that were at stake then were, were quite separate and only a little bit related to the ones that we've heard more recently about the role of nuclear weapons in Europe and how that relates to a Soviet attack of a conventional nature and so forth.

BUT DIDN'T SCHLESINGER ARGUE WE NEEDED TO HAVE A CREDIBLE FIRST USE WEAPON? AN ACCURATE ICBM THEN FIT THE BILL?

There are two terms that are very similar in their, in their language. Which really refer to two separate questions. One is the issue of first strike which is a term that is associated with whether either side should have the ability to attack the other's strategic forces in such a way that they could expect military or political profit. And the other is a term very close to first strike, called first use. And the debate that has occurred in the last seven or so years, led by a group of distinguish- ed former defense and security policy officials, saying that we should not have the capacity or a policy of using weapons first in Europe, is a different argument. The argument about first use in Europe means, should we state to the, to the Soviets, that we would never use nuclear weapons first. These are different kinds of weapons. These are, these are different kind of weapons than the MX. Based in Europe. Should we say that we will never use those first? So that if they come at us with a conventional attack, we still won't use nuc-, nuclear weapons first. And..and on that question and it's a separate one, but on the question of first use of nuclear weapons in Europe, my own view is it doesn't matter what we say. What really matters is what we do. If the President would get up every morning and call Gorbachev before breakfast and say, "I just wanted you to be sure that we will never use nuclear weapons in Europe first," it wouldn't matter nearly as much as what we actually do. If we have weapons of that kind in Europe, if we train our troops that way, if our manuals look that way, if we, if they know that our conventional forces are weak enough that we may actually have to use nuclear weapons, if any of those things happen, that's what will persuade the Soviets that we might use them first, and that's what make Europe in my view a less stable and safe place. But that's a separate. The debate about whether one does or does not...I'm trying to give you another...

ASKS ABOUT TURNING POINT IN THE COMMITTEE. ASKS RESTRICTIONS THEY PUT ON AIR FORCE DEVELOPMENT PROJECT.

Remember, one way to think about the MX is like a novel. It's a series of chapters, and each of them has a sort of an internal narrative and set of characters and each of them has a sort of an internal narrative and set of characters and it's played in different scenes. There was a pre-history to the MX before '76 and there were probably only a handful of us that were looking at it and reading the documents. In '76 it was still only a handful, just a few people on two of the subcommittees, one in the House and one in the Senate. So maybe as few as a dozen people that were looking at it. In 1976, when the Air Force first asked for funds for the MX by name, they, they actually for the first time also defined what that missile might look like. And I remember sitting one April afternoon in the Senate Armed Services Committee rooms, they're wonderfully, beautiful handsome rooms with the battle flags of the different units in the backgrounds. And this is where the country's business is done, usually in secret session. And I was sitting there trying to puzzle through these documents that the Air Force had sent over about the MX. Now remember that we had had for two years prior to that, in '74 and '75, two of the finest debates that the Senate has ever had on the key question of why the country ought to have nuclear weapons and for what purpose. The so-called counterforce debate. And so I'm looking at these and leaping off the page for the first time in official records, was a description of what this missile would like. It would have something like 10 or 12 warheads, it would have an accuracy that would be extraordinary, the, the blast or yield effect would be very great, and by a very simple calculation, that even I as anon-technical person could do, it meant that if we went ahead and bought those, and bought as they were saying we ought to buy, 300 of them, that no matter what we called it, we would have achieved a direct threat to the Soviet missile, land-based missile force, which is the core, the preponderant...core of their entire strategic system...in our own interest it was clear ...

WHAT'S WRONG WITH...?

So those who had opposed...

DON'T WE WANT TO PUT THEIR MISSILES AT RISK, DON'T WE?

There were. It had been debated in the Senate in the most explicit terms whether in fact it was in our national security interest to put their missiles in their silos at risk. And the Senate frankly was split, fairly evenly. If we had by the way, adopted the view that we should do that, explicitly as a matter of policy, it would be a rad, it would have been a radical change in our nuclear policy. We had for all the previous years for the most part explicitly forsworn that. Why? Because in our interest. We wanted to avoid a hair trigger on nuclear war. And it had been conventional policy, conventional wisdom for part of that time, that we therefore ought to avoid, as we hoped the Soviets would avoid, forces that would threaten the other...the other side's own nuclear forces, particularly land-based forces. So there, that afternoon, I looked at this document and it was clear that no matter what we said our policy could be, that if we went ahead and bought 300 of these missiles, counterforce missiles, we would have the most awesome counter- force arsenal that one could imagine. And one that clearly would have defined a policy. So then the question was, should the Congress insist that the President and the rest of the government state first what our purpose was and then buy the weapons to pursue that purpose. Or, should we simply proceed to build a weapon that even in the absence of clear policy would nonetheless define the policy. So one of the key issues in the entire debate was how we decide as a free country on what the purpose of nuclear weapons should be, and how we then buy different equipment to pursue that policy so that it would be clear that we were pursuing our best, in our best judgment what our own security interests are.

WAS THE SYSTEM PRESENTED AS ONE WITH A DECEPTIVE BASING MODE?

There were, there were about $78 million or something like that requested. By the way, that's a very small number. It was a very early stage in the MX development. And I would say something like three-quarters or more of that money was devoted to the missile. So that there was only relatively few dollars devoted to how we would base the system survivable. And the reason was frankly that not very many people at the time were that concerned about what later became the central issue of the late '70s and early '80s. That is the so-called window of vulnerability. People simply did not believe at that time that the Soviets were mounting the kind of attack to our missile force that would require us quickly to find a way of basing them survivable. Now there were other people who were concerned about that already. Paul Nitze was concerned about it. Some of the Senate Armed Services Committee was concerned about it. So the way that the issue was resolved in 1976, and it was a turning point in the history of the program, was that there was sort of a pincher movement that came politically on the Air Force in the fall of 1976. One from the Congress in which the two Congressional committees with the most responsibility, the two armed services committees, says "You should, if you're going to proceed to develop the MX, you should do so only for the purpose of ensuring the survivability of our missile force. "And from the other side, within the Department itself, the civilian side, you had Paul Nitze saying that the number one problem was the survivability of our... of our missile forces, and that that required an accelerated development of the MX. So those two things put together put, sort of squeezed the Air Force to switch the focus from the, from the missile side to the basing side. And it set up what, what proved to be one of the most frustrating and probably hilarious, if it weren't so serious, journeys in the search for the perfect basing system over the next several years.

WHAT DID HIS COMMITTEE DO THAT FORCED THE AIR FORCE TO DO THIS?

In 1976 the, the Congress, through the legislation on the MX, said that you shall not build a missile for the express purpose of putting it in a, in a silo. Technically you would build a somewhat different missile to put it in a silo than you would if you were going to carry it on a truck or something like that. They said further, the only primary reason we want to pursue this, that is the development of the MX program with the missile, is to ensure its survivability. So for heavens sake, go out and find, and put that, make that the emphasis of your work. And third, they said to the President, please tell us why, what it is you want us to do. What is the purpose of these weapons? What is the threat to that purpose? And then please, relate the, your next request before you go into the next stage of development. What they call full-scale development. Please explain to us the connection between the MX program, both basing and missile, to the purpose and the dangers to that purpose as you see them. Otherwise we won't consider your, we won't consider your request for the next step.

ASKS HIM FOR A ONE-SENTENCE SUMMARY

In 1976, after the two committees looked at the Air Force request, they sent back, as they gave them some of the money, that they would not consider moving to the next stage of development unless, until they had found the, a survivable basing mode.

WILL SAY IT AGAIN

So after looking at these questions in 1976, the Congress sent back loud and clear in writing, to the President and the Air Force, "We don't want to move to the next stage of development of the MX, unless you can find a way of basing our missiles survivably. That's the problem we want to fix."

WHY WAS CONGRESS MORE COMFORTABLE WITH SURVIVABILITY? AIR FORCE WANTED COUNTERFORCE CAPABILITY ALSO?

When I was a private in the Army I remember reading the sign that hung up in our office. "There isn't any reason, it's just our policy. "In the early days of the MX, in fact throughout the history of the MX, one of the struggles was to relate what was being asked to any clear definition of policy. In 1976, at this crucial point, there was not a very clear definition by Air Force or anybody else of why we were doing what they proposed to do. The money was put in the missiles so we had to reason backwards that the primary focus of the, of the program was not to make it survivable, but to build a missile that would be more threatening or more lethal to, in the fighting of a so-called counterforce conflict. Clearly Congress came to a different judgment. When Congress told the President and the Air Force that they were primarily concerned about survivability, there were at least two reasons why they did so. First of all was that there were people like Paul Nitze and others who really believed that the Soviets were mounting a threat to our missiles. And that this threat was something they would exploit for both military and political profit. So that later, the later cry about the window of vulnerability was, was already in full blossom and was influencing the MX. Then there was just the practical politics of it. There were many people who did not really want to have a counterforce capability as would have been achieved by the MX, who nonetheless said, "I'm willing to bet some money now in military research and development, to make sure the Soviets don't get an edge on us in the way that Paul Nitze and others are talking about. So that's what our R and D program is. It's supposed to, you know, hedge certain dangers that might develop. So people who were both opposed to a counterforce weapon and others who really wanted it, nonetheless could agree on the one thing is that we ought to make sure that our missiles that we do have or will develop will be survivable.

WHY WAS CONGRESS COMFORTABLE WITH SURVIVABILITY?

There were two reasons why Congress insisted on shaping the program on the issue of survivability. One was that there were many members who really were concerned that the Soviets were going to threaten our missile force in their silos for military and political profit. Later known as the window of vulnerability argument. And the other is that as a practical political matter, even those people who were, who did not want a counterforce missile...capability, nonetheless were willing to spend R and D money, research and development money, to hedge against that threat. And so there was in effect a common denominator of interest.

ASKS WHAT HE SAY THIS WOULD DO IN THE LONG RUN

When we got the definition of the MX program for the first time in 1976, it was clear that if you were just going to buy the missile it would cost you about one-third of what it, the projected cost of that same missile force in a survivable basing scheme. At that time they were talking about $33 million or something. So it was about $11 billion versus $33 billion. It was also clear that you could, if you were going to emphasize the missile or counterforce side of it, that you could take these same missiles and put them in the current silos.

INTERRUPTS HIMSELF THEY DISCUSS

One of the hardest things to do in policy, in making, in politics, is to look down the road to see what is likely to be produced by the first decision and what inevitably will be the sequence. When I sat there in that room that afternoon, it was clear that if we would proceed simply to buy the missile, which could be bought rather cheaply, and simply to put it in the same silos that we now have, that the country would not likely ever face up to the primary question: Why was it that we were doing what we were being asked to do? In other words, the basic debate about why we should have nuclear weapons, and particularly this nuclear weapon, would likely have been avoided. Why? Because it was cheaper and people weren't asked to be and do hard things. If on the other hand, if we emphasized the issue of survivability, which was a proper issue, the right issue, it also was going to set in motion a series of events, it was just clear as a bell to me that afternoon, a series of events that would engage the American public, because you had to put it someplace, and it would engage the higher regions of the American government to invent such a thing. Not easy to do. But which would also insist that there be a direct relationship between that development and an explicit purpose that the country could, could agree upon, having worked it through. And so when the committee agreed to tie this issue now to survivability, rather than simply to buying another missile, is it clear that we were setting in motion the quality of debate that would serve the country very well. It also was clear that it would make it very difficult for the advocates of the system to bear that burden, but if they did, and if the country agreed with them, then we could clearly proceed. What shouldn't have happened and under any circumstance was that we go ahead with something so important as the fundamental real definition of our nuclear policy. One which in my judgment would have been very dangerous. But putting that aside. Whatever. So a fundamental revision without having thought it through together as a free people...

After the Congress had written this direction out to the Department of Defense and Air Force, emphasizing survivability, I then was sent by the Armed Services Committee of the Senate to the West Coast. And out to the SAC headquarters, to review the program as it was then. So I remember meeting with two Air Force generals, superior professionals. One was General Kelly Burke, the other was General Hepher who was the program manager. Burke was in the SAC headquarters in Nebraska. He called me into his office, shut the door, and he says, "Now Larry. Have you read this piece about missile survivability?" And I said, "Well yes, it was a classic piece of literature on it. And he says, "Well, you know, we don't think this is really a problem here. We think that we can leave these missiles in the silos and it's going to work just fine." And so this direction he had given us in the Congress is frankly a problem. "And I said, "Well, if that's the way it works, you know, the Congress says this is what you need to do," and so on. Then I went out to the West Coast and General Hepher, the program manager, said, "Larry, have you read this." And it was a particular piece of literature. And he says, "I don't see why we have to move them out of the silos. The Soviets are not going to be able to attack them with any certainty or confidence. "And I said, "Well that may be General, but this is what in effect the bosses said. "So in effect, what we had in 1976, was an Air Force that really was very comfortable with leaving the ...with putting the new MX missiles in the same silos. Comfortable that the Soviets would not be able to attack them with sufficient confidence that they could get military or political profit. This was two years before the window of vulnerability.

THE AIR FORCE WAS TALKING ABOUT SURVIVABILITY. WERE THEY JUST TRYING TO SELL CONGRESS?

The Air Force officers who I met in this work, in the program office and in the command, Gen. Doherty who was the Commander in Chief of SAC and others, were really trying to do the country's work. To be sure, there may have been officers later who were in the business of, of trying to sell the missile like you would a car. But at that time they were trying to struggle to define the right question and then to answer it. One of the things that the Congress really helped them do was to define the question. Because as I said earlier .... sorry.

GEN. DOHERTY SAID HE WOULD ACCEPT ANY BASING MODE TO GET THE MISSILE BUILT. DID NOT CARE ABOUT SURVIVABILITY.

The debate continued for a number of years after the '76 decision, about how important survivability really was. Some of the operational Air Force commands and their officers felt that it really wasn't necessary to move to a survivable basing scheme. Only later did they realize, I think, as the country began to work this through, that if you put this wonderful new missile that could threaten the other Soviet missiles in our own current missiles, and if, if both sides became convinced that our missiles were, could be attacked, then what you would get was the absolute worst of both worlds. You would have a missile that was more threatening to the Soviets in a silo that was no more survivable. So what you in effect would do was draw fire. It was worse than where you had begun with. Now, it took a while for everybody to work that through, and then finally most people said well, we just have to find a way of basing this thing survivable.

FORD ADMINISTRATION THEN HAD THE TUNNEL MODE, CARTER CAME UP WITH MPS MODE.

One of the hilarious, if it weren't so serious aspects of this whole tale was that once the country said we've got to find a way of...of basing this survivable, we then went through dozens, in many ways hundreds of different ways of trying to survive, of trying to do that. This was started under President Ford, and continued through President Carter, and on into the early Reagan Administration.

WHAT WERE ABSURD BASING MODES?

The first proposal was to put, to build a huge tunnel, sort of like a massive sewer pipe, that would be hardened with concrete and steel. And then to build a truck that would drive up and down in that, at different places, and at one time they were also going to stop then at a particular point that had been especially hardened, like, well there was an enormous sort of task. You had to build a special truck for it. It was going to be out in the desert. It was very hard. So then that sort of went away for reasons that we...well. So that went away. Then they came up with the idea that some people called the Big Bird. Now you would take an airplane that could stay aloft for a long time, and you'd put an MX missile on there. And in a time of crisis you would go aloft where you couldn't be shot at in the open. You'd be over the United States. And you'd simply circle as long as the crisis existed. Well that proved to be not very effective because it was so expensive and you could only put a missile or so in there. And so on. Then they came up with something that at one time, one of the more hilarious spacing schemes was to make a...what amounted to an artificial lake in the American West. Now of course those who are not from the West may not be aware but there is not a whole lot of water there. And what is, is, is sort of valued by folks. But the idea was to put a lake in the middle of the Utah desert. And to put protective silos underneath that lake. You'd pump the water in and out. And you wouldn't let the Soviets know where you'd put the...the pea under which shell. But the lake would basically protect you. So when someone said, "Well, yeah, you could do it another way. You could actually put it, put it in the ocean. You could call it a submarine force." Which of course we had. Well somebody said, "Why don't you just put it in the Great Lakes?" But there was another one. Another, another basing scheme was to take a small missile and to proliferate it throughout the West. I'm talking about thousands and thousands, tens of thousands. Two, or ten or twenty thousands of missiles. Cheap, small, and you'd put them in silos that would be cheaply built and very soft. And you'd basically beat the threat by putting those, by proliferating those missiles so that the Soviets could not attack them all. Well, of course the guy who thought about this idea had never filed an environmental impact statement, or met with the Mormon Church apparently. As we learned later it was necessary in both cases to do. But there was a whole series of propositions. There was one, much later in the debate... I'm sorry, let me roll that back. Every one of these basing schemes ... Between 1976 and 1982, our government went through dozens of schemes. And if you look at them as a set, what we were struggling to do was to find an answer that would satisfy us technically. That the Russians could never, that we would survive any attack that the Russians might mount. And there was a whole set of underpinning technical judgments and calculations under these. One of the most difficult things about this and similar debates is that it's very difficult to, to base your conclusions as a government on actual scientific or empirical evidence. You can't go out and try one of these things. Well let's try a full up massive attack on the United States to see whether our missile force survives. You can't even attack one missile because we quite properly have a, a ban against open air testing, which what would be required to even attack one missile, with one missile, with one nuclear weapon. So all this, all this argument about which basing scheme would work, which by the way still continues in the...sort of the parts of the, of the security community that remains so totally out of touch with reality and particularly political reality. But anyway, all of those schemes turned on judgments which had the appearance of scientific calculations. But in fact were for the most part judgments. That is to say, you couldn't test it. You couldn't go out and try it... After '76 our country searched for six or eight years for the perfect basing scheme. We wanted a way of basing these things that under no circumstances would... After 1976, our government looked for the perfect basing scheme. We went through dozens, even hundreds of different ways of fixing this. Part of the problem was, is that all of these were based on calculations that had the appearance of scientific certainty and...but in fact were based on, on judgments that were highly theoretical, highly mathematical, highly abstract, rather than something that you could really get your grips on. You couldn't go out and test it, to see if this thing would work in a way that we would start a car and see if it would go around the block. So that the argument always then turned, almost as if our government was...a nymphomania... I'm sorry... So that no matter what seemed to be the favorite answer at the moment, because it was rooted in theory rather than in something you could go out and test, was immediately subject to challenge. And so that no matter which one we would settle on momentarily, it would attract critics from all sides. And there was no way of settling the argument. Only later, only in 1983 or so, did we come up with the scheme that sort of moved us away from the definition of the question. The question for years had been, how can we invent a basing scheme in which we would be highly confident that our missiles would survive a Soviet attack. Having failed to find one, and still wanting the missile, the Air Force came up with a very interesting argument that says, "Why don't we redefine the question as: How can we make sure that the Soviets could not attack our missiles with confidence? So we move the uncertainties about whether we could survive something we were never able to lick, to the uncertainties about their confidence in their attack, from their point of view. Well that was just right. And we came up with something called dense pack. Well the problem is, this one, like a lot of these others, were schemes that were subject to the snicker factor. I mean people would start to describe them and people would just sort of start giggling. In the case of the dense pack the idea was, was to base missiles so close to each other that the Soviets, not really understanding how the first missile would have nuclear effects that would eat up the second missile, the so-called fratricide...now I'm going too detailed.

DID BASING MODE BECOME A WAY FOR PEOPLE TO OPPOSE THE MISSILE?

The interesting thing about the opponents of the different basing schemes is that they seemed to come from all sides of the political spectrum. And they came from all sides of the argument about you know, how... why we ought to have these things and so on. For example, one of the early schemes, the so-called trench scheme, was, was killed for all practical purposes by very conservative physicists from the West Coast, who, on the basis of calculations on the back of an enveloped said, "You've got the hardness of this, this scheme miscalculated. And in fact you're going to find that nuclear effects will propagate and multiply themselves in ways you haven't taken into account. And that's a dumb idea." So he basically at a crucial point, we're talking about when Carter came in '77, took what was then the best candidate that the Air Force had and shot it down. As it were from the Right. Well that then kicked into motion a, this incessant search for some other way of doing it. And every time you'd come up one, with one, either somebody would say well look, that won't, that won't be compatible with an arms control, or that won't be compatible with the local community. Or someone else would say, it won't work because there's this problem that it won't fix. The problem was, is that all of these schemes were not subject to testing. You couldn't go out and test it in a way that anybody would have any confidence. It was by its very nature, it was more like theological argument than anything else. You know, we're a nation of pragmatists, we're practical people. Let's say, the way we've done our business for years is to say, "Here's something we want to do, or here's a problem facing what we want to do, let's go out and fix it." And the ultimate proof will not be what works in theory, but what will work in practice. But one of the missing elements of the debate was there was no way to test whether it would work in practice.

CONGRESS DID SAY TO GO AHEAD WITH THE RACETRACK PROPOSAL.

So in the late '70s as this MX problem got tangled up with the politics of SALT, the Carter Administration was interested as many of us were, in having a good arms control agreement, but they knew that somehow the MX program was tangled up with the SALT work in two ways. First of all, as a practical political matter, the Carter Administration needed to show that they would have a strong nuclear force at the same time that we were negotiating with the Russians. So arms control and the MX became sort of married in a shotgun marriage. They needed each other... In the late Carter Administration the MX program got caught up in the politics of SALT. As a matter of practical politics, those who wanted SALT sensed that they had to embrace MX and find a way of basing it ...survivable. And those on the other hand who wanted the MX knew that they had to invent a scheme that would be compatible with and a part of a general package with SALT. So there was a sort of forced or shot gun marriage between the program and the SALT advocates. Sort of a strange breed. This then required the MX inventors to find a basing scheme that would be compatible with SALT. Well there is sort of a tension there. On the one hand, since you're going to reduce or limit the number of missiles, you got to make sure the Russians will know how many we have. On the other hand, to make it survivable, you've got to make sure that they don't know where they are. So this proved to be a very formidable design problem for those who were trying to fix the problem of survivability.

ASKS BIGGEST TURNING POINT

The biggest, the biggest turning point in the program's effort to find a basing scheme, was first of all the agreement that that was the problem. Once that was set in motion, it was going to be enormously difficult, if possible at all, to find something that would meet the, the standards of confidence that the country expected. There was another major turning point in... Another turning point in the search for a basing scheme was when they settled finally in the late '70s on some variation of what was called a Racetrack scheme. Now this was simply a, one way of having the old shell game. You don't know where the pea is under which, which shell. Which is the way you make the Soviets uncertain about where they ought to spend their forces if they were going to attack. But the turning point came, as soon as soon as they began to focus on that, when...when we began to say, "We're going to put it here, or here." Up to that time it was an abstract debate about a technical design. Very few people involved. Only among the defense community. But when, when the country said, we think we're going to put it in Nevada or Utah or perhaps Wyoming, or in New Mexico or in Arkansas, all of which were at one time or another throughout this period, considered for one form or another MX basing. What you found that the local communities had a great deal of interest. And at that time the politics then developed, particularly in Utah, that frankly opposed the deployment of that missile in whatever scheme in their local communities for reasons that were totally unrelated to the technical debates that had gone on...in the think tanks and in the government offices.

THEY ARE DISCUSSING HOW HE WILL ANSWER QUESTIONS.

After we had gone through all of this search, through all of these, basing schemes, the, it was finally agreed that we would have a so-called racetrack basing scheme, like a shell game. And we would put it in Utah. Now remember the debate at this point had been largely among a small number of people, within the security community, who thought about it in theoretical and abstract terms. But when they said, we want to put this specific scheme in this specific place in Utah, then for the first time you got the American public engaged, and when they thought about it, they thought about it in fundamentally different terms than the theorists had. They said: We're talking about right here. We're talking about our families living down the road, we're talking about water, that you're going to need it. We're talking about a construction crew comes whom we don't know and they're going to start dating our daughters, that's where they happen. We're talking about not in... and we're talking about, most of all, we're talking about a vivid sense from where we live everyday, about what a nuclear war might look like. And so, what one had appeared to be okay in theory, proved to be absolutely laughable and rejected, and unacceptable when we thought about it in terms of where we lived.

DID YOU THINK THIS MIGHT BE THE CASE BACK IN 1976?

When I sat in that room in '76 and looked at for the first time the description of that missile, and realized that it would define a new policy, I realized that all of that, all of the arguments had been theoretical. But I realized also that if the Congress put, I ...So when I, for the first time saw the missile defined in this document that the Department of Defense had sent to our committee, I realized that no matter what we called it, it would define a new policy. A war-fighting policy. I realized also that if we, that if the committee and the Congress said instead, we want to make sure that whatever we buy will survive an attack from the Soviets, that that would inevitably engage the American public because eventually we were going to have to define a particular basing scheme and defend the theory in practical terms, not theoretical ones, and we were going to have to put it in a particular place where Americans live every day. And I believed at the time, that the character of the debate would be radically transformed, not to a yes or a no, but to the different way of thinking. From one which was, which had been highly mathematical to one that was very vivid and concrete. That all Americans could engage in. Because there are certain questions that American citizens have as much standing as any theoretician or any official no matter high, how high, and that is, what is it we are really trying to do here? And another question is, how would it work in practice? Another question is, how does that fit with this other thing? And as soon as we got the argument in that, in... defined in those terms, it was inevitable that we were going to have a different quality of debate.

WAS HE SURPRISED IN THE END THEY PUT 50 MISSILES IN SILOS?

One of the amazing things is that six years after the Congress gave that direction, that we ought to form this, shape this program for the purpose of survivability, in literally the same room that I had first read that document, the Senate Armed Services Committee still believed that. That President Reagan had, largely because people who were his supporters and friends in Nevada and Utah, had said that we, that we were not going to pursue those basing schemes that had been proposed to that date. And so he sent in late 1981 a request for just the missile, but for no basing scheme that anybody had any confidence in. And so the Congress then, in this case the Senate Armed Services Committee, looked at this and said, "We said, six years ago, that we, that if you couldn't make it survivable, we were not going to give you the money." And they cut, I think it was a billion and a half dollars, out of that request. Anyway, as much as it was, for the missile and for what they thought were dumb and, and impractical basing schemes. And they insisted that the President go back and still try to come up with a way of basing this survivable.

BUT IN THE END THEY DID...

In the, in the end, what you got was a defeat, or a rejection, of the original proposition. The original proposition, in my mind, was 300 MX, in the current silos, with ten or twelve warheads and so on. In other words a counterforce capability. And right now it is as, it's a done deal. It won't be more than 50. It probably won't even be 50. And in this case, no matter what you call it, even though it's a counter-force missile, individually, the total force of 50 MXs does not make up a counterforce, American counterforce capability. There are not enough of them there. And the fact that they are not based survivable means that frankly most of the serious people in this business no longer believe that either side could really attack the other for, in the hopes of military or political profit. In other words, what the MX missile experience did was to force Americans back to the classic way we have solved problems, that is to, how would this work in practice. And as soon as we looked it, we, we looked at the argument that used to be called the window of vulnerability. When's the last time you ever heard the term window of vulnerability? It's out of, it's out of the American language and we no longer argue about it. But we now believe, what I always believed was the case and which most Americans believed was the, is the case, is that neither side could ever plan to attack the other with nuclear weapons in the hopes of getting military or political profit. To try to do that is just literally unreal. It's out of touch with human, common sense. And the way we, we learn that, something we have always believed in, was, is to go through this very difficult argument, to face up to what is it we're trying to do here, and what would it take to do it. Well if the problem is survivability, then we have to have a survivable basing scheme. Let's look at them. None of those things will work. We don't want it here. Let's go back and review the question. And the premise, and the theory behind it. And then we basically rejected it. Not in a single vote, but by just, it went away with a whimper.

ASKS IF HE FEEL SOME SUCCESS IN THE DIMINUTION OF THE MX IN BASING MODE AND NUMBERS

You know, one of the really difficult things to understand is how some of these decisions are made. Even though I participated in them and many of them. For all of the arguments about the character of the missile, whether it was a counterforce missile or it could actually get that done. And the survivable basing schemes. One of the critical questions was how many we would actually buy. And the original 300 dropped down to 200 under Carter. And then it was down to oh, 100 or something like that for a while under early Reagan. And then one day, so far as I can tell from the public prints, in one afternoon in the White House, Ed Meese or somebody scratched his head and said, I'm sorry... You know these debate and the decisions that are made are not, are not as neat and pretty as a lot of theoreticians or political scientists would have us believe. Things sometimes just happen and nobody quite knows the reason why. The original request for 300 missiles which would have given us a counterforce capability no matter what you called it, was reduced under Carter to 200, which was sort of on the cusp. One day, one afternoon, in the middle of 1981, somebody in the White House, I was told it was Ed Meese, scratched his head and said, "How about 100. That's a nice round number. "Well no matter how you based 100 MXs, even though each one of them had the technical capacity to attack a hardened silo, together they did not make a counterforce capability. So the issue that had been argued out in theory years before was settled because somebody said, 100 sounds like the right number.

AND THEN IT WAS REDUCED FURTHER.

Then it was, that number, now that number 100 has been further reduced because of the confusion about how to base even that number survivably. So we're now down for all practical purposes to 50 and there's no way in the world that we're ever going to above that number. In a sense, the entire history was rather like a fever that came over us, as a people. It was a time when we were deeply anxious about our own security for a whole variety of reasons, including the hostage crisis and so on. There was also the case, it was also true that there was a sort of a theoretical argument that needed to be worked out. And the MX became sort of the vehicle through which we made the, we had that experience. But ultimately the MX which is a symbol of all of that has now gone away with a whimper because, not because of any theoretical argument, but because in political practice, what needed to be done, that is to find a survivable basing scheme, simply couldn't be found in political practice.

BUT THE SOVIETS DON'T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT POLITICAL PROTEST TO BLOCK THEIR DEVELOPMENT OF LARGE ACCURATE MULTI WARHEAD ACCURATE MISSILES THREATENING US?

The Soviets don't have to file environmental impact statements. They are much freer to allocate their resources and build what they think they want. The dangerous thing is what that means. There have been people who have argued that a democracy, a free people, have a hard time competing with an authoritarian government. I don't believe that. I think we did pretty well. One of the things we learned and I suspect the Soviets are learning from this that the idea that you could fight and win a nuclear war has got to be one of the dumbest goddammed ideas that...has ever come on the human race. And we rejected it by looking at how it would work in practice, and now that we find that certain arms control proposals are possible, that the Soviets are looking at these things in different ways. It may well be that they learn from us on this.

WASN'T HE WORRIED BY SCHLESINGER'S COMMENTS ABOUT LIMITED NUCLEAR WAR IN 1974?

The debates we had in '74 and '75 about whether we ought to prepare ourselves to fight a nuclear war, were some of the best I, I knew about in my 14 years in the Senate. And that idea was deeply disturbing to, to members of the Senate of all persuasions. We had a good argument about it and even though my own personal view got defeated both times in a divided Senate, it was clear that the country was coming to grips with this key question for the first time in the modern era. What is it, what is it we were really trying to do here? What, what were the purposes of these weapons? And those two so-called counterforce debates which didn't get a lot of notice but which the Senators look back on as being very special times in which the Senate acted as, I hope, our Founding Fathers wanted us to, to argue questions.

ASKS AGAIN ABOUT SCHLESINGER

In 1974 and '75, when Secretary Jim Schlesinger began to advance the notion that we ought to buy the kind of weapons that could only be used for the purpose of fighting a nuclear war, what we had for the first time was a person who was a product of a culture. RAND. PhD in economics out of...and so on. Who looked at these questions almost entirely in abstract and theoretical terms. And he, he triggered one of the biggest and best debates on the central question of why we ought to have these weapons, in the United States Senate. So there were a lot of people who for the first time scratched their head and said, "This guy is simply out of touch with the real world."

WHERE SHOULD WE GO FROM HERE? WHAT'S THE LESSON FROM ALL OF THIS?

I think the net effect of all of these debates about the MX has been to resolve that issue pretty cleanly. What you find is, are sort of after effects of the same logic being applied to other weapons systems. For example the Midgetman proposal which is a single warhead and lots of them, is really based on the same logic as the MX, it's just a different answer to it. I think that we still haven't totally come to grips with the basic question: Why do we have these weapons? What do we want to do with them? What does that require us to have? And I think what we are going to have to do if we're going to make any progress, is not to come up with one or more other weapons systems to solve the old questions. We're going to have to redefine the questions. And I think the question should be: How can we, in practical terms, prevent the use of even one nuclear weapon? And that means we're going to have to think about different questions than we have been arguing about. How can we come up and stop a nuclear terrorist? How can we stop one by miscalculation? How can we make sure that neither side's theorists can convince themselves and the body politics of either side that you could actually use one of these things with, with, for profit? And if we could do that that is the clearest path I know to some sort of sense of safety in the face of the nuclear danger.

WAS THE PROCESS OF THE IMPROVEMENT OF THE ICBM WAS DRIVEN BY SOMETHING BEYOND YOUR CONTROL? BY THE TECHNOLOGY?

The, the fundamental issue that a free country faces in the face of, of, of really deeply technical questions, was how can we come to grips with this as a free people and decide? The original vision that we had was that we as a free people could, could shape our own future. Well how do you do that when you have a technical issue of this kind? And the way you do it is you have your own Congress and your own President and your own self say, What is it we're trying to do here? And how does that technical fix relate to that purpose that we've argued through? That's the way you make the connection. If you try instead to become an amateur technician, or an amateur expert, then all you'll do is pick up the same confusion that the technical community has. One of the things that the technical community does not do well is to relate specific inventions to clear national purpose. We have to do that for them. As Churchill said, experts ought to be on tap, not on top.

BUT IF ACCURACY WERE THERE, WE'D DO IT.

Just because a thing can be invented doesn't mean that it's good for us and just because the Soviets could invent something doesn't mean it's good for them. It's not, it's not so much what we think or what we build, it's how we think about it. Do we think about it in ways that are actually practical and concrete? Do we actually say, if we were to go ahead and build this thing, how would it work in practice? And as soon as you looked at the theoretical underpinnings of the MX missile, and a lot of other missiles that are being proposed, the theories simply melt in the face of actual human experience. I mean, it's, it is a form of, of unreality to consider the human species to seek something that you could rational. In most of the, of the, of the kinds of attacks that are being talked about as part of this debate. What we have to do is somehow regain our, our sense about what is, what is...what is real. It's not just a question of what is true. In a technical sense. And it's not even just the sense of what is good. In a sense, what are my values. If the fundamental question is what is real? I mean, the, we are a nation of practical people and we have to solve problems in a, in a practical way.

The irony was it was Ronald Reagan who finally did in the MX. It did in it not because of any engagement with theoretical arguments. He did it because he didn't want to put it in Utah. He didn't like the racetrack system because he thought it was incompatible with SALT. He did it largely out of instinct by all signs. And although...The irony is, is that the guy who did in the MX was Ronald Reagan. And he didn't do it in because of any theoretical doubts. He did it because he didn't want to put it in Utah and Nevada. And he did it because he didn't have any confidence in some of the basing schemes that were offered to him. And he did it even though he, Ronald Reagan, had been the principal sponsor of the very theoreticians who had given us the window of vulnerability. And even though he had in many ways ridden to office partly on, on that cry. So, so these things are ironic in that way, in those ways.