RECALLS HIS 1978 STATEMENT ABOUT OUR MILITARY CAPABILITY. WANTS TO KNOW WHY CRUISE AND PERSHINGS WERE NECESSARY.

It was true in 1978 as it true now and will be true after the destruction of the intermediate range nuclear forces that US strategic forces will be able to cover targets in Europe. There was a political concern in Europe which to some degree remains that a US response with its own strategic forces was less credible than a US response and consequently a US deterrent using forces based in Europe where the Europeans could see them. That was behind, that was part of the reason for the dual track decision in December of 1979. A desire to increase the coupling between conventional forces in Europe and the US strategic capability. Another part of the reason was that the Soviets were building up their SS-20 forces which immediately threatened Europe and created what seen in that narrow sense was an imbalance in forces. Both of those reasons argued for deployment of INF and certainly for deployment of INF failing a Soviet willingness to reduce or eliminate its own intermediate range nuclear forces, the SS-20 and the older generation missiles that has preceded them in being deployed but had not then been...had not then been replaced. That was the basis from where we are now. It seems clear that the Soviets would not have been willing to reduce their SS-20s or remove their SS-20s if the Alliance had not been prepared to show that it was willing to match them. And in that sense again the deployment was a success.

WAS IT BECAUSE OF POOR ACCURACY?

Not particularly, no. The actual and certainly the projected accuracies of the Minuteman were adequate to destroy the targets of interest. It was true that both the Pershing II and the ground-launched cruise missiles were still more accurate than the Minuteman IIIs but the prospects for improved accuracy of the US strategic forces, whether ballistic missiles or air-launched cruise missiles, were adequate to hit the targets.

ASKS ROLE OF BRITISH PRESSURE

The issue was raised and it was raised by several European countries. The British defense ministry was interested in these. I can't pinpoint a time at which support was forthcoming, but I would not say that the initiative came from the UK anymore than it, as much indeed as it did from the Federal Republic of Germany.

WHO DECIDED ON THE RACETRACK SYSTEM?

Well in the end of course the decision was ... approved and in that sense made by President Carter. But it was pushed largely by the people in the Dept. of Defense and specifically by myself. There were many different proposals. There had been dozens, beginning in the 19 -- early 1970s, involving all sorts of deployments. Rail mobile, in tunnels, road mobile, fixed silos, multiple silos. And there's something to be said for many of those deployments. Indeed part of the part of the problem that we face is that no one is so clearly superior to ail the others as to make the decision clear cut. But in the late '70s, analyses made in the Department of Defense and my own office, suggested that a multiple protective shelter mode would be cost effective in the sense of being less expensive to make survivable than it would be for the Soviets in a pre-emptive strike to destroy them. I myself had earlier favored vertical shelters which were considerably less expensive but the problem of verification in an arms control agreement was considered very important by both Secretary Vance and by the President. And we therefore elected to proceed with a design based on horizontal shelters in which the missiles could not be fired directly from a shelter and thus verification of the number of launchers would be easier to handle. That had the additional advantage that you could move the missiles around from one shelter to another, even during the 15 to 30 minutes of warning time that you would have after a Soviet pre-emptive attack was launched. That meant that even if by some, in my view, unachievable technological breakthrough and operational breakthrough, the Soviets were able to pinpoint which of the shelters contained missiles when they fired at them, they would know which shelters the missiles were going to be in when their own missiles landed. That... that answered what in my judgment was a not very realistic concern but it did answer it. Those were, that was, those two were the advantages, verifiability and the ability to re-target or to move and make the targeting impossible whereas before it was almost, only practically impossible. Disadvantage was a significantly greater cost and in the end what I think was a, a greater disadvantage, the system looked somewhat contrived.

DID SOVIETS OBJECT TO VERTICAL SHELTER?...RESTARTS HIM

The Soviets during the negotiations disliked the idea of, of, of multiple shelters altogether. Whether because of the issue of verifiability or because whether they would be survivable is a matter of conjecture. But...in my own judgment the concerns came less from the Soviets than it came from US people, much concerned with arms control questions. At the time of the SALT II signature in Vienna, I had a four-hour meeting, this was in June of 1979, with the then Soviet defense minister, Ustinov. The main subject of that meeting was conventional force reductions in Europe, the so-called MBFR negotiations. But I...deliberately and as had been agreed on by the US principles beforehand, brought up the multiple protective shelter question, told him it was the intention of the OS to go ahead with such a deployment of the MX missile and that the Soviets in signing the SALT II agreement should understand that that was our, that our understanding was such a deployment was allowed by the SALT II agreement. And the Soviets then went ahead and signed the agreement and the Congress then appropriated the money and approved the deployment scheme.

ASKS IF DEPLOYMENT SCHEME DEPENDED ON SALT BECAUSE MPS SYSTEM WAS DESIRABLE ONLY IF RUSSIANS WERE LIMITED.

Well. If the... if the MPS agreement had gone ahead as planned. If the MPS basing mode had gone ahead as planned, there would have been 4,800 protective shelters if I remember correctly, which would have taken 9,600 Soviet warheads in order to destroy. Certainly the SALT II agreement limited the Soviet warhead numbers implicitly, so that would have taken practically all of their force. In that sense the SALT II agreement made the MPS mode more effective. In the complete absence of a SALT II agreement in which the Soviets could have gone ahead and deployed 15,000...20,000 warheads, an MPS system would have had to add more shelters. If the Soviets had 20,000 warheads, then there might have had to be 10,000 shelters. That was economically feasible and as I say probably would have continued to be cost effective. That is to say the shelters would have cost less to build than the Soviet offensive systems to overcome them would have cost. However, you did start to run out of land in that particular deployment because the horizontal shelter mode adopted took up more land than a vertical shelter mode for example would have taken. Nevertheless in principle you could have expanded the MPS system and used more land and remained survivable even in the absence of a Soviet, of a limitation on Soviet warhead numbers. It probably would have been technically and militarily in, in a narrow sense more appropriate in the case of complete failure of arms control to have deployed a terminal defense system as an overlay to the MPS system which could have handled an indefinite number of Soviet ICBM warheads. But that as just an hypothesis at the time, a hypothesis that we explored with studies, cost studies and so forth. But one that in the event became moot because the incoming Reagan administration abandoned that particular basing mode.

WAS HE SURPRISED AT UTAH PROTEST?

There had been a buildup of public protest at every military system during the 1970s, whether it was silos to protect ballistic missiles late in the decade, antimissile deployments, ground based, early in the decade. Communication systems to communicate with US ballistic missile submarines communication systems that were to be based in Michigan and Wisconsin. So in that sense I was not surprised. I was surprised in the end by the breadth of those public objections and the effect that they had on the local governments. The, in my judgment, the position that the administration took, the Carter administration took, what the President expressed saying we won't put something where people don't want it, went too far. Because it's always difficult to tell what people believe. Those who are concerned about something express their views understandably, much more strongly than those who don't care one way or another.

WAS HE ASSAILED BY A FRINGE GROUP?

No I think it was fairly widespread but it wasn't clear how universal it was. The...different people were for it. Those obviously who would participate in the construction were for it. Those who worried about the local economies were for it. Those who felt their own lifestyles would be disrupted were against it. Looking back on it, it seems to me that it was not well handled but I think it might, and how it would have come out in the end I really don't know. As I say, the whole thing was aborted by the Reagan administration's decisions and I don't know whether, had the Carter administration continued in office, whether it would have been able to overcome the objections and handle all the environmental concerns or whether in the end we might not have gone back for example to a vertical shelter system that would have used perhaps only one-tenth of the area. It's all, it's all academic now.

In the end I think that the concerns of the local people in Utah and Nevada had more effect than the complaints that it was an artificially conceived system for arms control purposes. There was a certain inconsistency between those who said, "You're doing all this for arms control," and those who said, "It's a first-strike weapon." After all if it's a first-strike weapon you don't need 30 shelters or 20 shelters or 50 shelters per missile. You need at most one. You may not need any because if it's a first-strike weapon purely you can fire it from a soft configuration since it won't have been attacked before you use it. No I think that the bigger effect was the concern of the local people about the influe...about the effect on their environment or the concern that somehow this would make them a target whereas before they would not have been a target. And in the end my own judgment is that that's why President Reagan abandoned the system. He didn't abandon it because it was an arms control type system. He abandoned it because the Senators from Nevada and Utah to whom he was very close politically urged him to drop it.

ASKS HIS PERSONAL REACTION.

Since he had been saying the same thing during the campaign I wasn't all that surprised. My own reaction was one of disappointment that so much work had gone for nothing. Combined with an anticipation that as has been proven to be the case, he would have a great, his administration would have a great deal of trouble finding a preferable substitute.

CITES HIS CRITICISM OF REAGAN'S DISMISSAL OF 10 YEARS OF RESEARCH. HOW DID HE FEEL ABOUT THAT?

Well I thought it was a great waste and a great mistake. It, it may be better to have some MX missiles than none even if you put them into vulnerable, into vulnerable silos because on doesn't have to make the whole the US deterrent completely invulnerable and able to survive a surprise attack of, of indefinite size. But. It would have been much better and served a much more useful purpose had they been put in a more survivable basing system.

WHAT HAD CHANGED THAT IN 1983 IT WAS OK TO BASE THEM THERE?

As I've already said, what is far inferior is not necessarily worse than nothing. And that didn't change. It was so in 1980 and it was still so in 1983.

IT WAS MORE IMPORTANT TO HAVE...

Well to have the option of continuing, to have the missiles. If you had a program in which you were building some of the missiles you could then continue to work on the question of what's a preferable basing mode. If you don't have the missiles and no missile production line, nobody's going to bother to answer the difficult question of what's the right basing mode. They'll say you have no missiles to put in them anyway, why bother.

ASKS PRIMARY MISSION.

It was designed to be part of the US deterrent against the Soviet nuclear attack or to some degree an extended deterrent as all of the strategic nuclear forces are, against lesser Soviet attacks. It was designed to complement the other parts of the strategic triad-~the bombers which can survive only with 15 or 30 minutes warning, and the submarine-launched ballistic missiles which for the foreseeable future, at least for the next couple of decades, one can't be sure forever, can survive for a much longer time and with no warning at all. But are more difficult to communicate with, more difficult to re-target, more difficult to use in a counter-military mode.

WHEN HE THOUGHT WE NEEDED A COUNTERVAILING CAPABILITY, HOW WOULD MX PLAY A ROLE IN THAT?

To the extent that it can survive, but even to some extent if it can't survive, much more if it can survive, it can hold at risk hard Soviet targets and hold them at risk in a short time. There was no other system that could do both of those things. Now that's a very...that's a limited part of the US needs, of the US targeting requirement. But it's a significant part. It includes the Soviet hardened ICBMs, which they obviously value very highly or they wouldn't have spent so much money on them, and which worries US strategic planners. It includes the Soviet command structure, at least that part of it which is hardened fixed sil...fixed facilities. Now those would not be used, those would not be a target early in any hypothetical nuclear war. When no one knows what a nuclear war would be like, but one thing is clear, you would not, having been attacked, respond immediately with a retaliation against the Soviet command structure. Because that would make it much harder to terminate a war on whatever terms. But, should the Soviets elect to go all out against the US and destroy our military capability, our command structure, our industry, our population, our recovery capability, our economic recovery capability, one would want to have a military capability to target the Soviet command structure too so that they would know that they could not expect to survive in a position to continue to command their own forces and to run whatever remained of productive capacity in the Soviet Union. So that, that group of targets, Soviet hard targets, either those that would need to be attacked quickly such as the Soviet fixed silo based missiles or those that one would not want to attack early but one would want to be able to attack later one with high precision and high lethality, would both have used the land-based ICBM capabilities.

ASKS IF THERE WERE CONFLICTS BETWEEN PURPOSES IN BASING MODES.

It certainly would have made more sense to call the new missile Minuteman IV. But what size it would have been optimally I don't think mattered a great deal. A five-warhead system would have weighed half as much. It would have been somewhat easier to move around. On the other hand if we've wound up with a horizontal shelter system it still would have taken a very large mobile launcher to move it around, and it would have occupied just as much area in the Southwest. So, although it might have been easier to go ahead and build the missile, the basing system problem would not have been a great deal easier. It's only if you go to a very much smaller system, perhaps the size of the proposed Midgetman but certainly no bigger than the existing Minuteman III that you're able to move things around somewhat more easily.

SO YOU RESISTED THOSE...

I don't think that that was a major issue.

ASKS ABOUT SEA-BASED MISSILES.

Well we had a sea-based missile, I mean you could have called it the Trident II and a half. But it would not have answered the purpose of the, of the advantages of land-based missiles. You could communicate with them better, you can adjust the timing of their firing better. I think there is a legitimate case that you can get by with a bomber force and a submarine force and no ICBMs. And perhaps even a better case that you can get by with a bomber force and a submarine-launched ballistic force and a non-survivable ICBM force. But that doesn't mean that the submarine-launched force saves, serves the same purpose as the survivable land-based ICBMs force. In particular, what do you do if you accept the vulnerability of the land-based ICBM force, accept that the bombers require 15 minutes warning and then 10 or 15 years down the road you find out that the submarine force is not so invulnerable after all. In other words, a survivable land-based ICBM force is substantial insurance against breakthroughs in anti-submarine warfare, whereas another submarine-launched system clearly is not. You can consider that a big worry or a small worry but however big a worry it is, another submarine force doesn't answer.

ASKS ABOUT HOW THIS WAS USED POLITICALLY.

Of course the window of vulnerability was a political more than a military construct. It was made considerable political use of and the window was closed by the Reagan administration in the mid-1980s in the same way that it was opened by the Reagan campaign in 1980. That is, rhetorically and verbally without any change in the military situation.

WAS HE PLEASED WITH SCOWCROFT REPORT?

I thought it was a reasonable estimate of the situation. It pointed out that the window of vulnerability was considerably less... considerably less concern than had been maintained. At least in part and through the 1980s because it is not possible to launch an attack against bomber bases and missile bases at the same time the one from submarines and the other from Soviet ICBMs and have them land at the same time. So you can't have simultaneous launch and simultaneous impact. Which eases the problem at least until the submarine force of the Soviets becomes highly accurate which is still quite a ways off. It also came up with an alternative land-based ICBM which would be survivable against a...could be depending on how you based it again, be survivable against a large Soviet pre-emptive attack, would serve the ends of arras control by going to a single warhead per missile, and was clearly technically feasible. Its disadvantage was that it was very expensive per warhead and when the report came out I, while endorsing the report, indicated that one shouldn't look on the Midgetman as a panacea, particularly because it was going to cost more per warhead than the other systems.

DOES IT HAVE TO BE MOBILE?

It has to be mobile to be survivable. If...there seems to me little virtue in replacing Minuteman III with three warheads by the same number in the same silos of Midgetman with one warhead. All you've done is cut the effectiveness by three.

ASKS ABOUT RAIL GARRISON CONCEPT.

The rail garrison MX is clearly cheaper than the mobile Midgetman, mobile hardened Midgetman, but it requires not only tactical warning, it requires strategic warning. In other words you need to be able to disperse it a couple of hours before an attack is launched on it. And therefore I don't consider it a very good idea. It seems to me that it, although it makes sense to continue building some MXs and to look for a somewhat different basing mode, it seems to me that MXs in a rail mobile mode are only slightly more survivable than MXs in silos. True, you can by dispersing them on strategic warning make them less vulnerable, whereas in order to avoid being destroyed, MXs in silos have actually to be fired which is a considerably more weighty decision to do. You don't really add enough to your survivability to justify the uncertainties that I have about whether you can actually disperse them in, on the basis of strategic warning.

( )?

Well there are always a very large number of solutions available and it is difficult to know when to proceed from one to another. In particular, in 1978, unlike in the early 1980s, defense budgets were still limited and the fact that the Midgetman would cost several times as much per warhead as the MX weighed quite heavily. As it is likely to weigh again, and I think that is going to cause Midgetman considerable trouble over the next, well, during the period 1988, 1989.

WAS CARTER NOT SO EASILY PERSUADED ABOUT RISKING OUR MILITARY TARGETS?

You could have improved the accuracy of Minuteman III and thus put those same targets at risk, but you would have done it... you would have been doing it with a highly vulnerable force. Which meant that you would have had to have launched them before the Soviet missiles arrived on our silos. And that it seems to me was the main argument. Once you build a new missile in order to make it mobile, the accuracy comes automatically. In fact it's very hard to avoid. And in my judgment, it is very hard, in fact I couldn't argue yes, we should make our missiles inaccurate, that way we won't be able to hit the targets. Or destroy the targets.

HOW DID HE BRIDGE GAP BETWEEN HIS HIGHLY TECHNICAL AND THEORETICAL WORK AND THE PRACTICAL UNDERSTANDING OF CARTER AND OTHERS?

Nuclear war is very difficult not only for farmers In Utah and Nevada to understand, it's very difficult for anybody to credit no matter how long they've worked on issues that are connected with it. And many people, many who worked rather hard on it, conclude that you don't really need to worry about any of this because nobody would ever start a war knowing that this is a possibi...that the destruction, such enormous destruction to themselves could possibly result. And on one level that's true, except that if a war started having said that, I don't think those who were charged with the defense of the country could ever justify their actions. Of course they wouldn't be around to justify it. I think that the case was not made well to the people in Utah and Nevada by the people in the Defense Department, those of us who were supposed to make the case. I don't think...but I'm not sure that the people in Utah and Nevada...

The people in the Defense Department who were charged with explaining this, including myself, obviously didn't do too well. But the people in Utah and Nevada didn't get all of their ideas about this from the people in the Defense Department who were explaining it to them. They got them from the media, they got them from opponents of the system, both on the left and on the right, and I think they weren't very well informed.

SUGGESTS THEY FELT LIKE A TARGET.

They would be anyway. See the... Somehow, somehow too many people in the United States somehow have believed, or have been persuaded that the contest is between the US military and the Soviet Union. That's not the case. The contest is between the United States and the Soviet Union. And if deterrence were to fail, then Americans near military bases and far away, on farms and in cities, on seaports and in the middle of the United States could expect devastation.

CITES CONTROVERSY OVER SPACING MODES. WHEN IT WAS RESOLVED BY PUTTING THEM IN SILOS IN 1983, HOW DID IT FEEL?

Well in fact it wasn't okay because the Congress resisted very strongly and in the end allowed only 50 missiles, 50 MX missiles, as opposed to the 200 that they had in principle approved during the Carter administration. And in my judgment the issue hasn't gone away even with respect to those 50. I believe that the 50 that have been planned for deployment and are in the process of deployment should be deployed, but in fact the problem hasn't gone away and unfortunately for the country, many of the people who had made such a big issue against the multiple protective shelter system, specifically President Reagan and Secretary Weinberger, found that having eliminated that method they were unable to find one that was a good. And that continues to this day.

DO THEY REGRET IT?

I think few of us regret what we do, we ...instead rationalize it. And I think they are no better or no worse than the rest of us in that regard.

ASKS ABOUT DECISION TO GO AHEAD.

When President Carter decided not to go ahead with the B-1 he made it much more difficult to avoid going ahead with an MX modernization of the Minuteman. He was aware of that, at least should have been. I told him so at the time. My own judgment was that it was more important to have a missile modernization. Many in the Air Force disagreed with me but the President I don't think made the decision on the two of them together. He first decided on the B-1 and then when it came time to have a MX decision, he found he had less room for maneuver than he had thought. In my own judgment that was, the outcome was at least up to the point of deciding to go ahead with an MX missile. It was not a bad outcome. It was more important to have an MX than, than a B-1. It is clear that President Carter recognized that a failure to modernize either the bomber or ICBM component of our strategic forces would make it very hard to get acceptance of a SALT, of a SALT agreement on the part of the pro defense members of the Senate. And so I think that did have an influence on his decision to go ahead with MX – which I strongly recommended to him.

WAS THERE A TURNING POINT WHERE HE REALIZED THE MPS SYSTEM WAS DOOMED?

Not while I was in office. In fact in my judgment it wasn't doomed until President-elect Reagan made it clear that he would not proceed with it. It will be interesting to see whether a subsequent administration reverses that decision.

ASKS ABOUT OTHER BASING MODES.

None of them were entirely new except dense... None of the basing modes that came up in the Reagan administration were entirely new except dense pack and even dense pack was simply a version of the vertical shelter system which relied on the so-called fratricide effect which nobody can completely rely on. What about them? I mean... there are just some additional kinds and there are some still newer ones that invite some examination. Again, we get into a situation where, where the decision maker is surrounded by alternative options, no one of which is so clearly superior to the others as to command everyone's support. He therefore has to pick one that is acceptable and rely upon his authority and his knowledge-ability to get it through the government apparatus. We had done that in 1980. Whether it would have stuck is not clear. What is clear is it has not been done since 1980, that is to say, no one with sufficient authority and conviction and believability has made a decision in such a way as to allow it to proceed through the executive and legislative branches.

ASKS LESSON FROM THIS.

That it's solvable. That it's solvable technically, providing that it is solvable in terms of govern-ability.

ASKS HIM TO EXPLAIN.

What I mean is what I've just gone to great lengths to explain to you. There are, there are systems that are militarily acceptable, that are technically acceptable, that are economically acceptable. What remains to be seen is whether a decision can be made that will carry through the executive and legislative branches on the basis of those characteristics.

POLITICAL?

Well it's the leadership question.