WHEN YOU CAME INTO 1981, HOW IMPORTANT WAS THE GOAL OF BUILDING THE MX? WAS IT THE CENTERPIECE?

Well it certainly was part of it. You have to bear in mind that when we came in office, into office in 1981 we found that all three legs of the triad were very much obsolete, obsolescent. Obviously they do a tremendous amount of damage, but they would not have the capability of hitting Soviet hardened targets. They wouldn't have the accuracy or the yield. And in every way the, their deterrent capability was eroded, which is not surprising because some of them are 25, 26 years old. So yes, replacing the Minuteman III with an MX was a very important priority. So was replacing the B-52s which were 27 years old with the B-1s. And so was getting a missile in the submarines, the D-5 missile in the new Trident submarines. And most important really of all was improving the command and the control and the communication. In other words, we had to do everything for a new strategic triad almost as if we had started from scratch. Instead of what we should have done, which was through the '70s modernize the individual legs.

HOW IMPORTANT A ROLE DID MX PLAY IN THAT ROUND?

Oh a very important role. It was the designed missile, the planned missile, to replace the Minuteman. If you go back and start to design one from the beginning, it takes 8, 9 years and we couldn't wait that long. We had this missile designed. We wanted to make it as survivable as possible, mobile if we could. And we tried a number of different modes of deployment, appointed commissions to make recommendations to us, and all the rest. We, but it was very vital. If you believe in the, in the idea of a triad. A triad was just three different ways of exercising your strategic offensive capability. It has a redundancy in it. It is much more survivable than if you rely entirely on one leg. And our belief was and is that we needed all three legs and we needed to modernize them. So the MX was very important. It was not our only priority. But it was a very important priority.

WHAT DID YOU SEE AS THE CHIEF FLAW OF THE BASING SYSTEM THAT THE CARTER ADMINISTRATION HAD BEEN TRYING TO DEPLOY?

Well the chief flaw really was the fact that it required first of all 240 missiles and something like 2,400 silos. The idea ...

LET ME CORRECT YOU, BECAUSE I THINK IT WAS 200 AND 4,600 SHELTERS RIGHT?

Whatever it was. My memory was that it was, that they wanted ten for each one. But it could have been more.

IT WAS 23-TO-1.

Alright. 23-TO-1. That's even worse. What you had then was a tremendously expensive program. But each one of those silos, however many there were, the location would have been known to the Soviets. And so you wouldn't gain a great deal of survivability. The plan was to open everything up on January 1 and let them see the silos that were occupied and then we could move them around and it would take immense quantities of real estate. And enormously expensive project.

YOU WERE ENUMERATING THE PROBLEMS WE HAD WITH...

Yes. So that you'd have this enormous expenditure of money. You would have a tremendous amount of real estate that had to be acquired. And you wouldn't really make it any more survivable. It was basically called a Racetrack method. You would have all of these holes around. The more I think about it the more I think you're right about the numbers. And then you'd just drop them in from time to time. You'd have to move them on rails or trucks. And it was something that because the location was fixed, even though there were many, many locations, they were fixed and therefore targetable by the Soviets. You wouldn't add to the survivability. So we had all taken the position, all through the, the 1980 that this was a very silly system. And we, we still feel that way. So we tried to get something that was as, more survivable at less cost.

NOW I UNDERSTAND, IT SOUNDS FORM YOUR REPORTS, THAT YOU WERE BARRAGED WITH PEOPLE FROM THE AIR FORCE TRYING TO CONVINCE YOU THAT WE SHOULD GO AHEAD AND DEPLOY THE...

Oh yes. It always amuses me when people say that we gave the services everything they wanted. And that I just rolled over and told the services to go ahead and do anything they wanted. We fought very, very strongly against strong Air Force support for this plan for about nine months. And we told them in the beginning that we weren't going to do it and we didn't do it. But it always amuses me when people tell me how much I've given the services everything they wanted. This is the first example where we not only didn't but made it very clear that we were going to sometimes, if we felt that these were the right things, going to do it. But in this case we felt that the Air Force recommendation was wrong and we didn't follow it. And it caused a bit of abrasions from time to time but after all my job was to preside over all three of the Services and to do what the civilian leadership felt was best.

I KNOW BILL VAN CLEAVE AND SEYMOUR ZEIBERG AND GENERAL HECKER ALL CAME TO SEE YOU. WHAT DID YOU SAY TO THEM WHEN THEY WERE THERE ASKING YOU TO...

Well I didn't see very much of Van Cleave. But others who came, we told them that we just thought that the system would not be survivable, that the Soviets could overwhelm it, that we had spent an enormous amount of money and not have anything very much better than we had now. And that what we needed was something that was truly mobile, or that had far more protection. It was really, in all the consideration of this that the President began to think very seriously about strategic defense. Instead of just trying to make your own missiles survivable, why not try to just destroy theirs. And that's another concept that's frightened the Air Force initially very much, and everybody else. But now is widely accepted and when you take polls you find strategic defense is very popular.

WE SPOKE WITH SENATOR GARN, BECAUSE HE WAS FROM THE STATE AFFECTED AND HE ACTUALLY TOOK CREDIT FOR HIMSELF AND SENATOR PAUL LAXALT, FOR CONVINCING THE PRESIDENT THAT THAT WAS A BAD SYSTEM.

That's -- I'm very fond of Senator Garn and Senator Laxalt, and I respect them both very much, but the chronology doesn't fit that story. The President was opposing this all through the 1980 campaign. And I don't know how many of his campaign speeches I listened to and some that I made myself in which we all talked about this rather silly system that we thought the Carter administration was sponsoring. There's also another myth around since you raised this point. And that is that it was just the environmental considerations of two or three states that convinced President Reagan he shouldn't do this. President Reagan was convinced he shouldn't do this about nine or 15 months before he became President. And there were environmental objections, there are environmental objections to everything. There's absolutely nothing you can think of that doesn't have environmental objections. But that was not the determining factor. The determining factor was it would give us no increased military security, no increased strength for the triad at enormous cost.

WAS THERE SORT OF A FUNDAMENTAL CONTRADICTION BETWEEN THE IDEA OF TRYING TO HIDE MISSILES BUT ALSO BEING ABLE TO LET THE SOVIETS VERIFY?

Well the original idea was that they could verify. This was this New Years Day thing that I mentioned where you opened up these silos and looked, and let their satellites look in and see which ones were occupied. Then you would close them up and thereafter you, I mean it's mad. Then you'd be able to take trucks and mobile units around and move them to these hundreds and hundreds of spare silos. And that therefore theoretically they wouldn't know where they were. Which is nonsense. Of course they would know. And they would besides have them all targeted anyway. So that, the idea was to try to get some additional survivability. I don't fault the good faith in trying to get an idea like that and it is very difficult. And we have proposed various basing modes that the Congress won't accept either. It's not an easy task. We have now what we believe is the proper MX. Instead of 240, we have 100. We thought 100 would be sufficient. More than sufficient. The Congress has allowed us to deploy 50 in the old Minuteman silos, and we have 50 that we're trying to persuade the Congress should go on a rail-based mobile system that would start out in fixed locations and be able to be moved. Very short notice. Within a few hours, to any other location, not previously known, not previously targeted by the Soviets. And this I think is the most survivable way to deal with a missile of the size. And the weight and the yield, and the accuracy I might say, of the MX. The MX is an extremely accurate missile. This adds to its deterrent here, capabilities.

NOW IN 1981, IN OCTOBER, THE DECISION WAS ANNOUNCED TO GO AHEAD AND PUT THE MISSILES IN SILOS IN THE MEANTIME. WHY WAS IT FOUND YOU COULDN'T DO THAT IN THE MINUTEMAN SILOS?

Only because Congress didn't vote the [money]. They wanted something different. This was a lot of remnants and matter of fact the majority actually of people who had previously been convinced that the old Racetrack system was the one they wanted and it was very hard for them to acknowledge that they were wrong on that and that they didn't want to shift. We could have done that immediately. That's what we're doing right now with 50. But we should have 100. And the second hundred were per... the second 50 we're perfectly willing to have, in fact we want to have, on a rail-based system so that they move around on trains and can be fired from previously, not previously surveyed locations, surveyed by the Soviets.

NOW DR. TOWNES TOLD ME THAT HE HAD PERSONALLY RECOMMENDED TO YOU THAT HE WOULD LIKE TO HOLD OFF ON DEPLOYMENT UNTIL A NEW BASING MODE COULD BE FOUND. AND OTHER MEMBERS OF HIS FIRST GROUP PANEL WANTED TO START WITH 100 MISSILES AND 100 SHELTERS AND THEN MAYBE THEY COULD EXPAND TO AND MBS SYSTEM WHEN NEEDED. WHY DID YOU FEEL THAT YOUR BASING SYSTEM...?

Well we felt the great urgency because it's not very safe to have your, your deterrent, one leg of your deterrent or any leg of that deterrent, not very accurate, not with enough yield to destroy Soviet hardened targets, not enough accuracy to hit them. And the Soviets knowing this. And also these missiles not all that survivable. So what we, and I respect Charles Townes very much and actually appointed him to that Commission. They made some very valuable recommendations, one of which was that we should look at an airborne mode which we found quite interesting, but again, there was objection to this because it would require the design of a new plane. And this again is a delay. When you are in the situation I was in, when you have those responsibilities, you can't delay six, eight, seven years while you think about possible new ideas, and then design part of them and then not have them adopted. That is what has happened. We deployed the Minuteman in the 1960s and we never did anything about it until 1985 when the first MX missile went in, except talk. And the Soviets in the meantime deployed four whole new systems, all the time we were debating and discussing and arguing back and forth ourselves what, what kind of basing mode, what kind of missile we would use. They were improving and they are still improving. They are deploying right now the SS-25. They are working right now on the follow on to that and they never stop. And we stop to debate and discuss these things. And that's the nature of our system, we should do it. But we ought to have some terminal facilities when it's anything as important as maintaining a deterrent against Soviet attack. Now if we can take some of these out by treaty that is verifiable, that would be great. But you can't ever let the balance get so far away from you, to get so far out of balance, that the Soviets would feel, even for a moment, that they could make a successful first-strike without any real retaliation. That's the critical thing. That's why strategic defense is so vital. You don't rest your whole survival on that kind of a mutual suicide pact. If you can get strategic defense, you can destroy Soviet missiles in the air before they get near any target and that's what appeals to the President and to me.

DR. TOWNES FELT TERRIBLE BECAUSE HE SAID THAT HIS PERSONAL LETTER TO YOU ABOUT HIS RESERVATIONS ABOUT THE DENSE-PACK PROPOSALS HAD GOTTEN TO THE PRESS. AND HE THOUGHT THAT THAT WAS ONE OF THE REASONS THAT IT, THAT THE PROPOSAL WAS DERIDED IN CONGRESS.

Well a proposal was derided in Congress because virtually anything that the administration proposed, other people deride. You will find that ranging all the way from food stamps to highway widening and harbor dredging. You can't, you can't get away without that. Also you cannot, I believe, write a letter in Washington, or to anybody in Washington, without expecting to have it published. I didn't blame Dr. Townes for that at all. He's a very brilliant, Nobel-winning, Nobel-prize-winning scientist, great personal friend, and did a fine job on this Commission. I just didn't happen to agree with some of the recommendations he made, and he understood the political problems involved in some of them. He was asked to and did provide some very good advice on some highly technical, the so-called dense-pack system that they talked about had a great deal of merit to it. The important thing, however, was to get a response to the Soviet SS-18s and -19s and the -24, -25s, all the follow ons that they were doing, get a response to that in the ground, ready to fire so that they would know that they couldn't attack with impunity. And so there was a great urgency behind it. I felt a great, not only responsibility for doing this but a great sense of require, of, that it required, that it had to be done very quickly. And it's not an easy thing in a democracy to do things very quickly. That's one of the differences in our systems. In the Soviet Union, three, four, five men sit around in the Kremlin, they can decide overnight, and the next day it starts to happen. And in our system we don't have that. Fortunately. We shouldn't have it. We should have thorough debate and we do. Sometimes a little too thorough, if it's 14 years...

GIVEN THE NEED FOR URGENT RESPONSE TO THE SS-18 AND -19S WHY DID YOU GO AHEAD AND ACCEPT THIS COMPROMISE THAT SCOWCROFT COMMISSION PROPOSED? WHERE THEY WOULD SET UP A COMPETING PROGRAM, IN A SENSE THE MIDGETMAN, THE SMALL MISSILE.

Well we accepted that because the decision had been made to accept the recommendations of the Scowcroft commission in an attempt to get some kind of bipartisan support. The single-warhead missile, the so-called small missile, Midgetman, so-called or whatever they've called it, is again, an enormously expensive idea. First of all you have to design a whole new missile. And it is not, not designed, not really ready in any sense yet for production, even after all these years. It has only one warhead. You have with the MX the same or greater accuracy. You have ten warheads. And consequently you don't have to build nearly as many missiles or launchers. Consequently it costs a lot less and you get the deterrent power, which is the deterrent capability. One of the problems with all of this is that the American people and people in democracies understandably don't like to talk about all of these really very dreadful equations of deterrence and how much thrust can you have, and how many Soviet hardened targets can you destroy, and so forth and so on. But you have to use those equations. You have to think about them, cast them up everyday, which is what I had to do. To make sure that you have a deterrent capability at all times. It, you can't ever let it slip. And that is the critically important factor that we I think always have to have in mind. The small missile is an attempt to placate some of the opponents of the MX. It's a very typical democratic solution. Because you have one solution which is the MX, which not everybody will accept. Then you compromise. And the compromise was to build another missile. Very expensive. If we may use economic terms, not cost effective at all. And really not all that survivable, although it was designed and it was hoped to be mobile. And I think the more people examine it the more they'll realize that this is basically not a very sensible thing to do. It's an enormous additional expenditure. And if in the process of working out treaties to reduce the total number of warheads we can do that and we can get a verifiable treaty, I would suspect that the single-headed missile would be the first to go. You know the principle reason for its popularity? It was a missile we didn't have. And therefore people could support it. The MX, we had the missile. And if you supported the MX it meant, it meant immediate deployment. The small missile was a means of postponing the awful day and yet that awful day will come very, very much too soon if you don't have your deterrent capability maintained at all times.

SO IF THERE'S A BUDGET, A TIGHTENING OF THE BUDGET AND CONGRESS HAS TO CHOOSE BETWEEN FIFTY MORE MX IN A RAIL-GARRISON MODE AND GOING AHEAD WITH MIDGETMAN PROGRAM. WHAT WOULD YOU TELL THEM TO DO?

Oh I'd tell them in a minute to drop the small missile. It was a silly idea anyway, in the first place, and it was accepted only because of what were called the political realities that this was perceived as the only way to get the missiles we really needed.

COULD YOU RESTATE THAT, I CUT YOU OFF AT THE BEGINNING. YOU WOULD TELL THEM IN A MOMENT...

Oh I would just say in a moment that we, we should take the MX without the slightest question.

A LOT OF PEOPLE SAID WELL WAIT A MINUTE SECRETARY WEINBERGER, WHEN YOU FIRST CAME INTO OFFICE YOU SAID PUTTING THE MX IN SILOS WAS OUT OF THE QUESTION. YOU SAID THAT TO CONGRESS IN YOUR TESTIMONY BECAUSE WE NEEDED TO HAVE A SURVIVABLE MISSILE. WHY WAS IT OKAY SUDDENLY TWO YEARS LATER TO PUT THEM...

It was always considered a temporary move to try to get the deterrent capability we needed. It was always recognized that silo basing is not as survivable as we would like it. But it was recognized that the MX should be in the silos rather than the Minuteman because of its increased accuracy and yield. But it always was a temporary mode until we could persuade the Congress that something like rail garrison or something else was a better way to go. But meanwhile we didn't want to wait any longer. We had waited all those years while this sterile debate had been going on and while the Soviets had been getting in four new systems. That was why.

WE INTERVIEWED CONGRESSMAN NORM DICKS WHO APPARENTLY WAS IMPORTANT IN GETTING THIS COMPROMISE ACCEPTED IN CONGRESS. AND HE FELT THAT HE HAD WON A BIG ACHIEVEMENT IN PRESSURING THE ADMINISTRATION INTO ARMS CONTROL TALKS AND THAT THIS WAS THE DEAL. YOU GIVE US, WE'LL GIVE YOU SOME MXS AND YOU HAVE TO MAKE SOME ARMS CONTROL AGREEMENTS.

No, again he doesn't know the President very well. The President has wanted arms reduction agreements, not arms control agreements. Arms control agreements are like SALT. The Soviets added 4,000 warheads during the entire time the SALT agreements were in effect and they did it within those agreements. They didn't break the agreements to do it. But that's not arms control. That's not arms reduction. That's what the President wanted. The President has always wanted this and it didn't take any congressman to force him to do it. He's, he wanted it very much. He was however determined to get a good arms reduction agreement and not to sign something so we could tell some Congressman we had signed a piece of paper and everything was alright. That's what happened in the SALT agreement. That's what happened in the ABM agreement. And they are not good agreements. And they did not accomplish what people hoped they would. But the President wanted one that would accomplish something. And the INF agreement is a perfect example. We waited and talked about that, the President proposed that in 1981. It was signed in 1987. And it was signed after finally the Soviets realized that we had the military strength and the resolve as a nation to replace and to deploy stronger, more modern missiles, the Pershing II and the ground-launched cruise missiles. The agreement then was signed that eliminates all of them. And that is a major achievement. And that is what we hope, that we can get something like that with a longer range intercontinental missile. But you never would have gotten the INF agreement if we hadn't deployed Pershing. And I don't think you ever get enough... a START agreement, an agreement reducing the strategic missiles, if we hadn't deployed the MX, finally after all those years. Although we only have half enough.

SO THAT'S NOT TRUE THAT THEY WERE RESPONSIBLE FOR BRINGING THE ADMINISTRATION TO THE BARGAINING TABLE.

No, the, the administration was at the bargaining table from the beginning. It was the Soviets who were hard to bring there and they only came when they realized they had some incentive to reduce. And that incentive was growing American strength.

SO WHAT WAS YOUR REACTION TO THE SCOWCROFT REPORT, OBVIOUSLY YOU WEREN'T HAPPY WITH SOME OF THE RECOMMENDATIONS?

Well it was, I wasn't happy with some of the recommendations. I was happy with the fact that they endorsed completely the entire modernization plan of the President. And said that it should proceed and said that we should put the MX in existing silos. That it was vitally necessary to do this and do it as quickly as possible. That's the part I liked. But then they said, the political realities are that in order to do this you have to satisfy the small missile people. So after you do all of these things with the, that the President recommended, then in order to get some votes, you've got to give the small missile people what they wanted. And I thought that was pretty silly.

AND SO WHAT, AND THEN THE OTHER THING THAT CAME FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF THE QUESTION IS, PEOPLE SAID YOU GUYS CAMPAIGNED ON THIS WINDOW OF VULNERABILITY AND NOW YOU'RE PUTTING THEM IN THE SAME SILOS THAT WERE VULNERABLE 5 YEARS AGO. HOW CAN YOU EXPLAIN THAT?

Well first of all you had a far better missile. You had a more accurate missile. You had a missile that the Soviets knew could destroy their, their hardened targets. And that was a far more effective missile. You had ten warheads against three and one for some of the MXs, some of the Minuteman. And it was an enormously increased capability. We also were working at the same time on methods of deploying it in ways that would make it more survivable. But meanwhile, we had it in the ground ready and the Soviets knew it. And that was the critical factor. No one ever felt that putting it in the, in the old silos was a permanent or a final solution. But it was vitally necessary to do it to close that very window of vulnerability that people were talking about. There was that window, it was open, and it was open in the sense that we had a, about a twenty, twenty five year old set of missiles that didn't have the strength or the capability to destroy the Soviet hardened targets. And in all of this business we have always to figure, in the equations of deterrence required, that we figure how many Soviet targets you have to cover. We know how many that they have to cover over here and it has to cancel each other out. That's why this whole idea that the only way you can keep the peace is by this mutual suicide pact, this mutually assured destruction, this idea that you're perfectly safe so long as you have no defenses whatever. That's why the President never could adopt that theory, that's why he turned to strategic defense. Turned to it early, and that's why it's so vital that we proceed with strategic defense.

SO THE WINDOW OF VULNERABILITY, WHEN YOU USE THAT TERM IT'S NOT TO DESCRIBE THAT THE MISSILES ARE VULNERABLE IN SILOS, IT'S TO DESCRIBE AN IMBALANCE.

It's an imbalance both in their capability and in their numbers. Yes. And the MX was essential to, to correct that imbalance, to help close that window. Missiles in silos are vulnerable. And everybody knows that. But the fact that they are there carries with it this mutually assured destruction idea. Which is the only concept at that time that we had for keeping the peace. And preventing a nuclear war. Now we have the strategic defense initiative, and that's a far better way to go as the President has always said.

I'M SORRY I'M GOING TO ASK YOU TO REPEAT THE FIRST PART OF THAT BECAUSE I INTERRUPTED YOU. THE POINT YOU WERE MAKING THAT THE WINDOW OF VULNERABILITY IS NOT JUST INVULNERABILITY IN SILOS BUT THE BALANCE OF...

Yeah. The window of vulnerability isn't just the fact that the missiles are vulnerable in their silos. Missiles, Soviets and ours, are all vulnerable in their silos. Although the Soviet silos are much more hardened and much more difficult to destroy. And take a missile like the MX, so that the window of vulnerability was that the capabilities of the two forces, measured together, showed a dangerous imbalance in the Soviet favor. Not just in numbers but in capabilities, of individual... Or, people in the arms-control business tend to talk only about numbers of warheads. And that isn't any kind of a measure. You have to know the capability of those warheads. Will they destroy the targets that they have to destroy if you're going to keep your equations of deterrence, your balance. And ours would not and theirs would. And so that was the window of vulnerability. That's what the MX corrected. And it was vital to get it in even though we knew the missile silos were not a permanent solution. And we have now half in the silos, we'd like to have half on the rails.

GIVEN THE FACT THAT THE USE OF THESE MISSILES, OF THESE MISSILES IN THE COUNTERFORCE MODE WAS LARGELY THEORETICAL, THEY'RE DESIGNED TO PRESENT WAR. WHAT DID THEY CORRECT IN TERMS OF, WHAT WAS THE POLITICAL EFFECT?

Well they prevented. What they prevented was they prevented the Soviets from feeling that they could make a first-strike to which there would be no effective response. And that therefore there was nothing to stop them from making a first-strike. And when they feel that way, to turn deterrences fail. But when they know that there is a capability of response with an enormously effective, high yield, very accurate missile with ten warheads that can destroy the Soviet targets that they need to protect. Then you have deterrence. But a better way to get deterrence is to be able to destroy their missiles in the air before they get near the targets.

MY LAST QUESTION IS IF I WAS A SOVIET PLANNER AT THIS POINT, OR A STRATEGIC ANALYST SHOULD I, WOULD I BE WORRIED ABOUT THE AMERICANS HAVING THESE VERY POTENT MISSILES SITTING THERE IN SILOS THAT THEY WOULD HAVE TO USE OR LOSE.

Well I think, I think you ought to be worried but I think you ought to recognize that what has, has been achieved by the Americans having these missiles is that the Soviet missiles no longer could be sure, they could no longer be certain that they could have a successful first-strike. And that's the essence of deterrence. If they aren't sure. If they think there is a retaliatory capability, that would inflict a cost on them that's beyond anything they're willing to accept, and they're willing to accept quite a lot. Then you have deterrence. And that's the way you keep the peace. Until you get strategic defense.

IF WE DON'T HAVE THE CAPABILITY OF HAVING FIRST STRIKE OURSELVES HOW CAN WE EFFECTIVELY DETER THE SOVIETS?

Well because they know we have a responsive capability, that's the important thing. We don't have a first-strike desire. We have no first-strike agenda. But we know that they have in their literature and in their doctrine and in their planning, and we have to make sure that they never feel they can exercise it or execute it successfully. That's the critical factor of deterrence. And when they begin to think they can, as they work toward the end of the '70s, because we were not modernizing, we were having this sterile debate, we were leaving everything the way it was 20 years ago. And they had modernized four times over. Then you have to worry very much. If you had the responsibility as I had in 1981.