ASKS HIM TO REVIEW GROWING CONCERN OVER VULNERABILITY OF ICBM FORCE, AND ATTEMPTS MADE TO COUNTER THAT, IN THE 1960S.

Yes. Yes I can. Almost as soon as the Minuteman was deployed people started worrying about the possibility of it being attacked. For example, in the advance research projects agency, in 1963 or 64, hard point defense was one of the research items. And we worked hard on developing hardened radars and other systems like the interceptor system which would be effective there. So even as early as a few years after Minuteman was deployed, we began to worry about its susceptibility to a first strike by accurate Soviet missiles. But it really wasn't until the early '70s that the intelligence community began to gather valid information about these accuracies, and that the community as a whole began to believe that it might be possible to target Minuteman on a first strike and take out a large percentage of the thousand Minuteman that there were. That would be in the early '70s. As I mentioned to you earlier, the SALT support group in 1972 ran a study purporting to show that it would be feasible for the Soviets to do a first strike against Minuteman. By the mid-'70s the whole community began to agree that the combination of accuracy and yield that was available to the Soviets was sufficient to allow them to launch such a first strike and great concern for finding a basing mode that would make that first strike extremely difficult if not impossible began to receive great emphasis.

HOW DID HE GET INVOLVED IN THAT EFFORT?

Well initially I was a project engineer on radar as an ARPA and I was a major then. And you know, majors actually do work. Later on in the '70s I was a general in the defense establishment and the Director of Defense Research and Engineering. And I was involved in the policy making and the assessment of all these things. As you know, generals only pontificate, they don't actually do work.

WHAT WAS RESULT OF STRAT-X STUDY IN LATE '70s?

Well the STRAT-X study was a broadly based study to assess the strategic posture, and it included assessments of new ways to base Minuteman, a new undersea weapons system which was called ULMS at the time, Undersea Launch Missile System. But later became Trident. And other ways of defending Minuteman, perhaps with hard point defense. So this was a broadly based study involving all of our strategic triad and ways in which to make it less vulnerable and more effective.

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE IDEA OF HARD POINT DEFENSE?

Actually hard point defense has been continuously pursued over the years. In fact, I noticed that Herb York made a comment the other day that more '85 dollars, in other words, dollars associated with the year '85, were spent on defense than have been spent on Star Wars. He made that point. It's an interesting point and a lot of that work was in hard point defense. The idea of being able to defend Minuteman silos. It was an Army job done by the Army people and received considerable funding even after the SALT accords were signed in 1972. The concepts were still studied vigorously and technology work went on.

WHAT IS AIR FORCE DOING IN LAND-BASED MISSILE BUSINESS?

That's an interesting question and I can only answer it by asking you the question: Why is the Air Force involved in the ground-launch cruise missile business where they sit in trucks under canopies and drive out into fields in times of emergency. What I think is that politics and military necessity both make strange bedfellows. I'll tell ... to tell you the truth, these things just happen. If your Service just happens to get involved in a technology that wins through to success, then you get the responsibility for doing these things. Recall, recall the competition between the Army and the Air Force when they were first vying to see who puts satellites in orbit. The Army claimed this is just another piece of artillery, except the shell never comes down, it goes around the earth. And the Air Force is saying, these things fly through aerospace, therefore it must be our mission.

IS MANAGEMENT OF ALL OF THE ICBMS A PROBLEM FOR THE AIR FORCE? IT'S NOT CHOICE DUTY FOR MANY.

Oh I think that used to be true more than it is now because now far over half of all the people in the Air Force, in fact, over half of the officers are non-rated, not on flying status. So that the Air Force is really technically oriented in terms of the qualifications of its people. So, doing things like manning Minuteman and maintaining it are really right down their alley. And as a matter of interest, all of the costs of manning and operating Minuteman are, are, dwindle into insignificance compared with the cost of operating an actual Air Force that has air operations and air bases and airplanes. So it's really quite economical. If you check you'll find it's by far the most economical of the legs of the triad.

WHAT WAS TARGETING STUDY GROUP IN LATE 1960S ABLE TO DO THAT COULD NOT BE DONE BEFORE?

Well, that targeting group under, under, I believe it was in the early '70s, under James Schlesinger, who had the vision ... motivated by President Nixon's statement that as he saw it a President had only two choices if the Soviets were to attack. The first choice was to surrender and the second choice was to launch a massive counterattack against the Soviet Union. He said that is not adequate. Schlesinger picked up on that and formed this group which turned out to be an interagency group, in order to address the issue of what kind of intermediate levels which were meaningful and responsible could exist in our targeting policy. So that was studied for, I think, at least a year and a half, and finally was turned into policy. And that policy has been maintained. Harold Brown embraced it when he was the Secretary and it's been continued. The idea was that there would be available to a President a number of options from the lowest level to the highest which he could use to retaliate appropriate against...possible Soviet incursions.

WHAT WERE OPTIONS CONSIDERED?

Well I can't go into detail on any specific options but the idea would be that you would have a varying level of attack to, to constitute a reasonable response to anything that the Soviets might do. Which would have a good chance of not escalating into a major exchange. A lot of people are skeptical about that. And which would have a good chance of sending messages to the Soviets about our determination to be able to counter them at almost any level of violence.

DID SOME INVOLVE JUST GOING FOR MILITARY COMMAND STRUCTURE? OR FOR JUST CERTAIN GEOGRAPHIC AREAS?

Yes, as you, as you may know, the Air Force does not, excuse me. The Department of Defense, soldiers, don't get any pleasure out of killing civilians. All of their objectives are to try to attack the military or the infrastructure of an organization that they're at war with. The idea is not to kill all the people in a given nation, but to render that nation unable to continue the war. The idea is to stop the war with a minimum amount of death and destruction. So yes, the answer is that you sort of those things which you think are most crucial to the continuation of the war by the other side and you attack those.

DID WE HAVE THE HARDWARE WITH NECESSARY ACCURACIES TO ENABLE US TO CARRY OUT THE POLICY?

No. And the problem of course is with accuracy and with yield, but principally with accuracy. If you look at the equations that associate accuracy with yield, you quickly realize that accuracy is much, much more important. If you can have the accuracy you can increase the vulnerability by the cube of that, by the fact, by a factor of eight. So accuracy is, is the most vital. And even though we have always had accurate systems, particularly when compared with the Soviets early on, we still do not have either the numbers or the accuracy to do the kind that you're talking about. And as you know, that argument continues today, and that's why the Air Force is pushing the MX program even in undefended or vulnerable basing modes, in order to get that kind of accuracy that it needs to attack those targets it deems extremely important.

DISCUSSES ANSWER FORMAT. ASKS HIM TO REPEAT ANSWER DISCUSS HOW HE WILL ANSWER.

At the time of the new targeting philosophy, which wasn't really a new targeting philosophy, it was an effort to actually implement a philosophy that we'd espoused for some time. Even McNamara talked about less than massive retaliation. At that time we really did not have the capability to do the kinds of things that our new philosophy specified. Our new philosophy demanded high accuracy and a large number of weapons to attack the various crucial targets with minimum collateral damage. And with sufficient force to penetrate the hardness of those, of those targets. I recall that Secretary Schlesinger said, "By the way, our new policy is not going to be an excuse for you guys to go out and ask for a whole bunch of new capability." But in the end of course it turned out to be an evolutionary way to go after hard target kill capability, super accuracy, and medium to high yield.

AT THAT TIME, DID SENATOR MCINTYRE AND LARRY SMITH PRESENT OBSTACLES TO ACHIEVING THESE CAPABILITIES?

Yes that's right. In fact, they prohibited us from working on a better accuracy. At that time Minuteman had programs, some of which were engineered by the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory here in Boston to increase the accuracy, continuously increase the accuracy of Minuteman. Those programs were not permitted and for a number of years they were stopped by the Congress, particularly the Senate. And each year when we went over to testify, we were asked to confirm that we were not working on higher accuracy capability for our guidance systems for our intercontinental ballistic missiles.

DID AIR FORCE GET AROUND THAT PROBLEM?

Well I don't think they went around it because I think that would be against the law. I think even the wishes of Congress have the force of law, at least as interpreted by the DOD. But they did have some necessary things that they did which allowed them later on to develop guidance systems which were higher, of higher accuracy from that. For example, in order to understand the accuracy of Minuteman it is necessary to have a measurement capability that is better than that which Minuteman itself would have. And so there is a program in Minuteman for measuring Minuteman accuracies which resulted in increased accuracy for guidance later on.

DIDN'T CONGRESS WANT TO MODERNIZE THE MISSILE IN ONE RESPECT—VULNERABILITY?

Yes they were, it's true. Congress was interested in solving the vulnerability problem. And they were interested in not solving any further accuracy problems and there's a philosophy behind that, which is that deterrence can consist of not very accurate missiles because accurate missiles tend to threaten the other person's retaliatory capability. So the idea would be, if you had missiles which were ar..which were not accurate to threaten the retaliatory capability, but were plenty accurate to target urban industrial targets, which is a euphemism for people, then you had a deterrence capability and you didn't have to have the accuracy. And that was the philosophy that, particularly the Senate, held for a number of years. And there are still people who hold, hold to that philosophy.

DID AIR FORCE FEEL THAT WAS LESS URGENT THAN BEING ABLE TO FULFILL THOSE FLEXIBLE OPTIONS?

Yeah that's an interesting, Carole, that's an interesting way you said that. You said the, the Air Force wanted this and the Air Force wanted this. Actually it is true, in the Air Force there are individuals, some of them in high leadership positions that do have these advocacy positions. The truth is, however, and particularly I think this is true of missiles, and particularly in Administrations preceding this one. The Air Force proposed and the DOD disposes. In other words, people like Harold Brown and Johnny Foster and James Schlesinger and people like that, really determine in the end what the Air Force quote wanted unquote. And so to say that the Air Force wanted this is, is probably true, but what they want is sort of, I believe, it's sort of irrelevant. What they should have is more important. But there were people who were advocating that. Yes. In the Air Force. And, and I think I would be willing to agree that when the idea of having a new missile called the MX which was going to be a survivable based missile, the Air Force is more excited about building the missile and not worrying too much about the survivable basing. In fact, I've had a Navy Admiral tell me that there forces, their strategic retaliatory forces, have had, enjoyed much more success and much less controversy simply because they found their basing mode first and then they built their missiles. We did the opposite and so we've had nothing but problems for the last 15 years.

ASKS IF CONGRESSIONAL CONCERN ABOUT BASING WAS A PROBLEM WHEN THE AIR FORCE WAS TRYING TO MEET DEMANDS OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY.

I wouldn't say... there's always frustration in government and I think when we saw the Secretary of State testify recently in the Ollie North business, he, he said that repeatedly in his testimony. There is always frustration. What you think as a technical person is a perfectly rational pursuit, maybe not an optimum one, but at least a rational one, gets bogged down in politics to the extent that it frustrates you as a rational person. On the other hand, a politician faced with this incredible rationality of all these scientists, feels the same way about them. So there is always this tension. And it's part of the process. Secretary Schultz said that. It's really painful but it's part of the process. And I...I think yes, there was frustration and we worked hard and long hours to be responsive to the political issues and concerns about, about basing. And it was frustrating not to have it accepted.

... we were sitting back thinking, good, we're going to have a mellow period here of detente. And what happens. Terrible response by the Soviets. Which we didn't get into a panic, but you could, you could describe it as sort of a panicky feeling, a panicky situation. Immediately began thinking about, God, we've got to get another treaty. One which will have, be tougher, one which will do what we want to do which is establish a balance and freeze it.

HOW DID YOU GET INVOLVED IN DOING A BASING MODE STUDY?

Well I just happened to be in...when basing mode issues began to arise I happened to be right in the middle of the work that was being done. And the Air Force was doing the technical work, and the Department of Defense, Director of Defense Research Engineering, and then subsequently, the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, same job. Were actually in the business of disposing of what the Air Force was proposing. And I was in the middle of all that because on the one hand I had recently worked in USD.R. and E., then DDR and E... and I was now working in Air Force Systems Command which is the, the major command for acquiring systems in the Air Force. So I just had, it was just by a coincidence that I happened to be there, and at the same time I happened to have a considerable amount of experience in these matters, having worked on hard point defense as early as ten or twelve years before that.

GEN. LEW ALLEN ASKED YOU?

...Yes, I think...Lew Allen is an extremely intellectual person. He has a Ph.D. In nuclear physics and as you know he now heads a laboratory out at Cal Tech, JPL. And he worried about dispassionate objectivity and thoroughness. So he appointed me to be quote, an honest broker, unquote with respect to the technical aspects of the MX and its basing mode. So that's how we formed this analysis team of people inside the Air Force, of contractors and so on, to go and look at the problem dispassionately. And we tried to do that. We tried to do it dispassionately. We had a passion for being dispassionate.

WHAT DID YOU LOOK AT? DETERMINE?

Well here's what we...we...we we postulated the fundamental theorem of survivability. The fundamental theorem of survivability is that you trade off hardness against uncertainty. In other words, if you are quite soft, like an airplane, but you are flying around in the sky, your location is uncertain. And it's uncertain by a big margin. So you can afford to be soft. And if you're riding around in a truck, you're a little bit harder, but you can't make the area of uncertainty as large. So there are tradeoffs there. And that's what we did. We didn't say, "Let's have a missile, put it in a silo." We didn't say anything like that. We said, "Let's do tradeoffs between uncertainty. The area of uncertainty. And the hardness of the object." We decided that it's impossible to make an object so hard that you can keep it absolutely still, in other words, tell the Soviets exactly where it is, and have it survive. That's what their accuracy improvements did. They made that philosophy, which was a Minuteman philosophy, untenable. So now we have to have that thing in an uncertain region and still make it as hard as we can. You can see it, if you make it quite hard you don't use up very much land. You don't have to fly over the entire United States or drive your trucks down the Interstates. And that's what we traded off. And we tried to do that dispassionately and what we came up with then was a series of location which we called multiple protective shelter of a given hardness which then could be placed clos... relatively close together, and a field of these in which one missile was deployed but in which the location of that missile was unknown, became the method that we used. We knew of no other way since as soon as you have this thing moving all the time it becomes so soft that you can't find enough land to put it on. You can't have it standing absolutely still, so what you do is you move it periodically randomly, and spasmodically in order so the Soviets will never know. And what you have then is the equivalent of a very hard system that's capable of surviving very severe attacks. And...so in essence that's what our team of analysts came up with. And then we shared our findings with then the Ballistic Missile Office. And I hope we moved them toward an economical objective-basing mode. I'm not sure that we did. I'm not sure we had any effect, but at least that was our mission, that's what we set out to do.

WHAT BASING MODE WAS BMO EXCITED BY AT THE TIME?

They had several basing modes at the time and in fact had looked at 30-odd of them, or maybe you've heard of them. The frustrated people who put them together call them "The Dirty Thirty". But conceptually they're all the same as the ones that I just described. The idea of trading off area of uncertainty with hardness. They had air-mobile systems as one of their solutions. They had the underground tunnel system as a solution. They had the multiple protective shelter, which is now called carry hard as a solution. So they had all of these, but the, the principal competitors in the end turned out to be the tunnel system and the multiple protective shelter system.

WHAT WAS WRONG WITH TUNNEL SYSTEM?

The tunnel system had, had the, well, let me describe it very briefly. The idea would be that you would have a number of long tunnels and the missile on a railroad track or later on, not even a railroad track, but on a track in the tunnel. It would move around at random so that nobody would know where in this tunnel which is 20 miles long or so, it was, and that would provide the uncertainty of position. The problem was noted, however, that if the Soviets even found out which half of the tunnel the missile was located in, it would render the system penetrated because the system was based on the idea that the Soviets could barrage half of the area in which these tunnels were located. So the trouble with the tunnel was that there was some concern that the Soviets could isolate the location of the missile inside the tunnel, as some approximation, thereby reducing the effectiveness. Now...because it's very important for this location uncertainty to be preserved PLU they call it, "preservation of location uncertainty," a lot of applied physics was done to try to see if there was really any capability for the, for anybody, using the current laws of physics, as we know them, to find such a missile. And it appeared late in our development program that it would be extremely difficult if not impossible. That all the measures that could be used could be countered. So that that tended to go away as the tunnel became more mature.

ASKS ABOUT OTHERS IN DIRTY THIRTY.

Well there was the Sea Sitter. And...

INTERRUPTS.

We had the Sea Sitter and the Sea Sitter and the Sea Sitter was a seaplane which was equipped with one or more intercontinental missiles. And what it would do was it would fly around and land on the ocean. And stay there for a while until people worried that the Soviet trawlers or some overhead sensor might have found them, after which they would fly away to another point of the sea and sit there for a while. And as you can see, that's a very practical kind of a solution but when it bogs down is when you begin to cost out how much these Sea Sitters who must have ocean going capability, I mean they can't just sit anywhere. They have to sit in the ocean. Cost too much. But conceptually you see it's no different. Now there was another solution propounded by Sidney Drell of the Stanford Linear Accelerator, and Richard, my favorite person, Garwin, almost said Godwin. Richard Gar, Garwin, which they they called, they were small submersibles, and the idea with the small submersible was they would stay around the littoral of the United States, they would be very cheap, and they could fire whenever they wanted to because of the command and control system located down underneath the, underneath the littoral. Underneath the coastal seas. This fell for several reasons. One reason was that we already have a submarine force and this was just an addition to it. Some said. Another reason was that nuclear attacks on the coastal waters could roll back the ocean sufficiently so these things would, could be seen. A third was that there was really no way to get the cost down as Garwin and Drell thought they might be brought down. So that... those small submersibles, shallow submersibles, also fell by the wayside. Now there are innumerable of these but they all, they... We... let me tell you about one more. Grasshopper. The grasshopper system was a vertical takeoff airplane like say the Harrier, which would just take off on warning, go land somewhere else since it could land vertically it could land anywhere. It would have on it one intercontinental ballistic missile. What happens with the Harrier is it's extr...that kind of a concept, it's extremely expensive to operate. The acquisition of Harriers and missiles together constituted an enormous cost and so it too fell by the wayside on the basis of cost. Now there are all sorts of other ones. You know, you can have trucks driving around as I said earlier, in cities, but those were usually not even considered because we had a ground rule which is we do not wish to interfere with the day to day lives of the American people while we're, while we're doing this. That's one of the ground rules that we have, that you can see clearly the Soviets haven't. Because they're, they're, they've deployed anum...well they've deployed at least one of these mobile type systems. And that's just a conventional type of thing. On some kind of a large perambulator that wanders around in the Soviet tundra and the forests.

WOULD AIR FORCE PREFER AIR-BASING?

Yes, you would think the Air Force would prefer that and in fact a group appointed by the President to examine this concept in the, in the President's scientific advisory infrastructure, came up with the answer that an air mobile system should be good. And they were absolutely hurt when they discovered that the Air Force eschewed an air mobile system because it was far, far too expensive. And in fact I myself recall testifying in front of a Congressional committee to the, to that effect. That the Air Force did not wish to be associated with this because of its expense. And Kelly Burke who was at the time an Air Force general, also made the point, you know that if an airplane was practical for this job, the Air Force would embrace it. Therefore the fact that the Air Force isn't embracing it must mean that it's no damned good.

MAY'S GROUP WAS STUDYING POOL IDEA?

Yes, yes. The pools. Mike May's group was a Defense Science Board group. I was involved in that group as a general officer sponsor, a general officer in attendance. Or the point of contact, whatever the name of that is. And yes, he had good people working and they were looking at things like pools. The reasons pools are appealing is that water does not... does not transfer a moment from the surface down into the ground. So that movement on the surface of the water doesn't transfer down underneath, underneath the water. So that had certain appeal from the hardness point of view. Unfortunately, however, in the southwest of the United States, where these things were going to be deployed because there would be less interface with the populace, there isn't any water to speak of. And so there was a concern about having enough, enough water. Also there's a problem with corrosion, as you can imagine. Keeping these huge machines under water for years at a time.

YOUR GROUP SETTLED ON VERTICAL SHELTERS IDEA. CHEAP VERTICAL SILOS. AND THOUGHT MISSILE DESIGN SHOULD MAKE IT A MORE COST EFFECTIVE SOLUTION.

Yes, in fact, it was, it was somewhat the other way around. At the time that we did our study, we had not yet, the country had not yet locked into a 10-RV missile for the MX. The 10-RV missile concept came from the SALT II accords which permitted ten RV missiles of a given…size…yes.

DISCUSS WARHEADS INSTEAD OF RVS.

The idea was at the time we did our study, nobody had yet locked in on a big 200,000 pound 10-warhead missile. That was locked in on because that was the, the largest missile that the SALT II accords would permit. So that was defined after we did our study. At the time of our study a, a less large missile was more appealing, because it had to move around. And when you start moving around something that, that weighs 200,000 pounds and is approximately 100 feet tall, it gets rather difficult, it gets cumbersome, it's unaesthetic. So it is true that our study tended to focus on, on a relatively smaller missile. Even a missile the size of the Minuteman carrying three RVs, and we even priced out a single missile. And I wanted to say that the reason we honed in on a vertical silo was that when, when a nuclear detonation goes off, the, the vertical ground shock is of a sufficient amount that if you're horizontal inside a tunnel or inside a capsule, you are...your tendency is to be thrown around extremely much. And the amount of rattle space that you have to have in there to absorb that shock is really large. If you turn that vertically, then the distance is the same but the amount of space you have to have is much smaller. So the size of the vertical silo, the amount of concrete and steel used in it, is considerably smaller and the hardness problems are reduced. And so are the launch problems since you're already in a launching position. So it just turned out from our quote dispassionate view that a, a vertical silo was far, far better. And it was, it was easy to take, it was easy to handle except that you had to put it up vertically to drop it into the silo. And that wasn't difficult until the missile got very large. Now by the time it gets to be the size of the MX, that gets to be a problem.

MORE WARHEADS ON ONE BOOSTER IS COST EFFECTIVE, BUT DID YOUR COMMITTEE ARGUE THAT THE 3-5 WARHEAD WAS MORE COST EFFECTIVE WHEN YOU TOOK MOBILITY INTO ACCOUNT?

Yeah we did...we made that argument. And I think, I think it would be true that, that it comes outa wash. In other words there are economies to scale about having a big missile. Conceivably if you had one missile with a thousand RVs on it you could only have one silo...you'd only need one silo. However, when you examine the size of the roads that have to be built between shelters, and the size of the shelters themselves, then you start to get tradeoffs because obviously the bigger missile has to have a bigger shelter so that costs more. It has to have a heavier leap, more heavily founded roads so that costs more. The perambulators that carry it around have to be much larger. Everything has to be a lot larger. So the costs start to trade off. I mean the economies to scale tend to go away and we seem to...our results were that around five RVs seemed to be the minimum cost point.

ASKS HIM TO SUMMARIZE TRADE OFFS IN COST EFFECTIVENESS.

As I said this quote dispassionate team of ours was trying to examine just the engineering verities associated with these trade offs. Recall before I noted that you can trade off hardness with mobility. And also with mobility, when you start to get huge missiles, you start to pay increased penalties. The things that are carrying the missiles around, the transporter, erector, launchers, become extremely large and very cumbersome and very costly. The places that they're housed become large. The silos become large. The roads upon which they have to drive from silo to silo become, have greater requirements for solid foundations. So gradually those tradeoffs which tend to increase the cost of the system overcome the economies to scale that you would get by having a ten-warhead missile rather than say a five or a three-warhead missile. And what our group found was that the five warhead missiles seemed to be optimum with respect to having enough size to have some economies to scale, and yet be engineeringly able to go on roads which were modest, be put in silos which were modest, and be carried by perambulators, TELs, transporter erector launchers, which were modest. So that's how our tradeoff came out that way and as I said earlier, this all happened before the Department of Defense locked on the idea of having the biggest missile allowed by the SALT II accords. And so I think that particular concern that we wanted to be as good as we could possibly be, or as strong as we could possibly be, was overriding at the time. Because you recall, we were very surprised at the Soviet's actions after the SALT I accords. Where they went quickly out and did everything they were permitted to do under the SALT I accords to upgrade their ICBM forces.

WHY DID YOUR PANEL AND THE MAY PANEL SEE ADVANTAGES IN VERTICAL SILO MODE, YET CARTER SETTLED ON RACETRACK MODE?

Well...yes. The racetrack mode was called an abomination by some. There are several factors involved. One of them was the idea that a silo, of and by...

INTERRUPTIONS

The recommendation for a vertical silo system got changed even though all the physicists who were experts on nuclear effects saw the benefits of the vertical silo. Because of several factors. At least two stick in my mind. One is that some of the interpreters of the SALT accords believed that a silo of and by itself was a launcher, so if you had N silos, and only a tenth as many missiles, a tenth N missiles, you would have to take credit for having N missiles. Which would make the system indefensible from a technical point of view. The other thing was that people were afraid that this preservation of location uncertainty might not be perfect and it might turn out that the Soviets could figure out where the missile was in case we would, in case of which we would immediately have to start rushing around from silo to silo to prevent an attack. And when rushing around from silo to silo, it's much easier to pull the silo out horizontally or leave it on its carrier at all times, and just rush around from point to point. The problem with that is it's an inconsistency in viewing the system. The idea of the system was not to rush around in case the Soviets could figure out where the thing was. The idea of the system was to make sure the Soviets couldn't figure out where it was so you wouldn't have to rush around. And there was no barrier to make us feel that that wasn't a very plausible thing. The idea of preventing the Soviets from knowing. It's sort of like putting railroad wheels on a bomber in case people found out where the bomber was going to take off. You could put it on a railroad track and rush it off somewhere else. That's ridiculous, right? Because it's inconsistent. Well this has that same inconsistency associated with it, although not as blatant.

HOW DID HE FEEL ABOUT RACETRACK?

I didn't but I spoke with the people who spoke with William Perry and Harold Brown, one of whom was Seymour Zieberg. And made them aware of what I thought were technically verities. Obviously they made me aware of what they thought were political verities. And at the time to be frank with you they were responding very much to people over in the White House who were worried about a whole bunch of aspects of, of this system that were non-technical and really political. For example, at that time we were absolutely bent on having the system verifiable by national means. In other words, we believed that the Soviets would not allow us to come and live near their silos. And even though we felt we might be willing to let the Soviets do that near our silos, since we felt they wouldn't allow us to do it, we couldn't reciprocate. So, we actually made some modifications to the system in order that we, that the Soviets could...verify the number of these that we had by national technical means remotely, without actually having on-site inspection. Now you see what an arbitrary and capricious approach that was because now we are about to sign an accord which involves on-site inspection. On-site inspection turned out to be no problem at all in the end. So I thought that, I, as a personal view, I thought that we had done an inordinate amount of redesigning our system to suit what we thought the Soviets might demand.

DID THAT LEAD TO ITS TROUBLES LATER ON?

Only partially. Its troubles later on again were brought about by happenstances. For example, it just happened that the senators from Utah and Nevada were very good friends of Reagan and... and it just happened that our principal deployment sites were in Utah and Nevada so that when those two senators came out against the system, Reagan came out against the And as you recall he poked a lot of fun at during the campaign against President Carter. And having done that he was locked out of ever having embraced it again. Even, even embraced the concept that was even remotely like that concept.

HOW DID YOU TECHNICAL PEOPLE FEEL, WHERE YOU HAD BEEN SURE THE AIM POINTS WOULD BE CHEAPER THAN ADDITIONAL WARHEADS, WHEN CARTER PEOPLE WANTED A VERY COMPLICATED SYSTEM?

Well as you recall, our tiger, our Toomay Tiger Team was bent on trying to do that. They were bent on trying to reduce the cost of the shelters to the point where an additional shelter would be not only cheaper but much cheaper than additional Soviet RV. We lost that argument in a sense because other study groups, like, I recall, the Townes group for one, looked at that I think cursorily, but they looked at it, and they said, it looks to us like it's going to cost more to build one of these shelters than to add another RV. But we'd done that analysis and it looked to us like it would look less...that it would be less. But there was also the argument that it doesn't matter if it's a little bit more or a little bit less. But if it's a lot more or a lot less, then, then it does matter. And, and what we're trying to do is reduce the cost of each shelter to a minimum. Obviously you do that in any tradeoff because the things you have a lot of you want to be cheap, and the things you have a few of you can afford to have expensive. So we thought at the time and I still believe that the cost of an additional shelter was competitive with the cost to the Soviets of an additional vehicle.

WHY DID DR. PERRY SUBMIT TO ALL THE WHITE HOUSE MODIFICATIONS?

Well that's a good question which has nothing to do with his technical qualifications. Yes, he is very well technically qualified and he's a fine gentleman to boot. And I can't read his mind. But what I, what I estimate he did was see the necessity for a compromise between quote what the White House wanted unquote, and what the technical people wanted to give him. And other people might have come down and... in different positions and I respect the position he came down in. Even though I disagreed with it then and I disagree with it now.

WHAT ARGUMENT DID YOU MAKE TO ZIEBERG?

We made the argument that we shouldn't be doing this, and I don't know if you've inter, interviewed Si Zieberg or not, but I know in our, in our community this argument emerged. The argument is, let's do what those people want us to do now, but when the system is deployed, it's got to turn out to be more realistic and more practical. But let's not worry too much about these changes, even though it's onerous to go through all this engineering redesign that we have to go through when a little change is ordained.

YOU COULD REMOVE FEATURES LATER?

Or putting it another way, when the actual deployment of the system began to occur, that it would be seen that it was not a practical thing to do or a necessary thing to do. That the kind of technology we were undertaking to show that we could make the probability of location uncertainty high, would, would hold sway. And that the idea that a silo was really not another launcher could be negotiated through the SALT groups, and that these technical verities would prevail in the end. And that, that, that's probably quite a good argument. It might have happened.

HOW COULD WE HAVE BEEN SURE THAT WE WOULDN'T HAVE TO DASH? THAT WE COULD HAVE PRESERVED LOCATION UNCERTAINTY?

Well, the way, the way you do that is that you get, get all the applied physicists together who are experts in these areas. And you ask them to methodically list all of the possible emanations. And then you take steps to deny the, the detection of those. And when you've done that you feel good about having a scientific basis for preserving location uncertainty. And then after that you create teams which are given the mission of trying to penetrate your system. And so that for the years that go by after you have deployed, you continually have a team that's trying to figure out ways to penetrate the system, using, using all techniques imaginable. And in fact to give you an example of that, one, one person noted that there was a possibility of using... having a psychic find these things using supernatural powers. And the response of this gentleman was, "Good, let's get some psychics on that team. And if they can find out where it is, we'll figure out how to counter the psychics. "So we were even willing to, to take on parapsychology as a possible way that this could be, could be penetrated And that's how we, we ...we intended to satisfy ourselves on that score. And you may know this. That the submarine force has a continuing relatively high level program of research and development going on in order to see if the submarine system can be penetrated and to develop countermeasures therefore. So we patterned our philosophy after that and that's how we would get that feeling of comfort.

RANCHERS IN UTAH WORRIED SURVEILLANCE WOULD HAVE TO BE INCREASINGLY TIGHT AND THEIR ACTIVITIES WOULD BE CURTAILED IN THE AREA.

Well, the ranchers may have said that, that their activities would be curtailed, but it was the motorcycle riders that were really concerned. Because as you know they have made these ugly trails all through the hills of Nevada and Utah and they love to go out there with their dirt cycles and raise big clouds of dust and drink beer. And they didn't want that to be curtailed and even when we reassured them, they came to these meetings that we had out there in that area. When we reassured them that they would not be curtailed, they didn't really believe us. The ranchers were a little different. They were, they were worried that these various roads and so on would inhibit the, their ability to drive their, their stock where they wanted to drive them and so on. And we again assured them that that would not be a problem. And in private, it was interesting, in private the conversations after these formal meetings, they would acknowledge that they weren't really worried about that, but that they were just independent people and they didn't like to see anybody coming and encroaching in their area. When you look at the data, though, you find that virtually all of that area is already owned by Uncle Sam and over half the total income of the people in that area is already subsidized by Uncle Sam. So that the government is already very pervasive in that area, but they don't really appreciate that fact because they're used to it. And I... I honestly believe that this, the pervasiveness of this system would not have been substantial. You can fly up and look at the Minuteman system in a helicopter, and you'd be astounded that you can't even recognize where a silo is unless somebody points it out to you.

THEY TRIED TO BASE THIS WITHOUT PUBLIC INTERFACE BUT FOUND THEMSELVES UP AGAINST A VERY VOCAL PROTEST.

Yes we did. The tyranny of the minority. What we found was that the protest was vocal but it was not by a large number of the people. Although when the Mormon church came out against the system, and you will recall that happened, that turned out to be quite a blow. That's a moral blow to, to the system. And certainly was a substantial deterrent to our being able to deploy this system. But yes, we had a vocal group, but they followed us around from point to point. And when Lew Allen was Chief he, at one point he noted that this system was really designed so that it would absorb a large number of RVs before, of re-entry vehicles, of weapons, before it would be rendered vulnerable. And people picked up on that term "the sponge," and I recall at one meeting a person who was visiting Utah from Nevada got up in the meeting and he said, "It's a great privilege for me to be visiting here in the Sponge State of Nevada. "So that kind of rhetoric, you know, had... took its toll, there's no question about it. It took its toll.

PEOPLE FELT THE LANDSCAPE WOULD BE TAKEN UP BY THESE ROADWAYS AND MISSILES...AND WHAT WAS IT REALLY FOR?

That's right. I think that your appraisal is just right. The people did feel that, they saw this thing as a blight on the landscape. It's hard to realize... that something like this when you hear it described really sinks away into insignificance when it's actually deployed out in the vast areas that are available out there. And sometimes when you fly, sometime when you fly over the southwestern United States, look down and see the vistas, the ever...the open areas which are just virtually totally uninhabited. Or when you flyover West Texas, look down at the oil wells that have been drilled there, and how many thousands of them there are, a few hundred feet apart. Even as this system would have been. But far, far less number but even as this system would have been. And the people in West Texas have no trouble living with all of those oil wells.

THEY THOUGHT THIS WOULD BE A VERY LARGE PUBLIC WORKS PROJECT.

In fact the Air Force made...you know we soldiers aren't very subtle. And, and we tend to be direct and we tend...and as a result we often put our feet in our mouths. And one of our people actually made a briefing about that and he said, this is going to be the biggest public works project in the world. In the history of man. Making the pyramids look like a trivia. But... what he was trying to do was impress on them how much federal money would appear in this area, and what he did was impress upon them what a gigantic enterprise this was and how it would undoubtedly clutter up the landscape. Whereas just the opposite was true, in my belief. Once this was deployed it would, it would be not invisible but certainly not dominating the scene. What dominates the scene out there is the beautiful Wabash Mountains and the giant mining that's going on there west of Salt Lake City, Utah, which has totally destroyed the looks of the area.

WHY DIDN'T HE GO ON THE TOWNES COMMISSION WHEN INVITED?

At that time I was, I was suffering from burnout. When I was invited to participate in the Townes Commission. I was even invited to brief them. I declined on both points. Because I was just burned out. To me this was just another committee looking at the same old stuff, learning the same old things, reinventing the wheel again. And I really had no right to be that way. I felt no animosity or hostility. I just felt a certain ennui.

WHAT DID HE FEEL OCT. 2, 1981?

What happened...

REAGAN ANNOUNCED MPS WAS DOA.

My feeling was one of indifference. The reason being that you could tell it was going to happen before then. And I also had the nagging feeling that despite the fact that I felt it was technically the right answer I didn't agree that the MX and MPS was unaesthetic. It was not a beautiful solution, not the kind of a solution that a scientist or an engineer would be proud of.

BUT HE OPPOSED THE SYSTEM, THOUGHT IT AN ABOMINATION.

Well that's, that's, that's when this business about being a military person comes into play. A military person is always instructed if he's given a lawful order and it's not a crime against humanity, you should carry it out and do it with a will. So the idea is that you do all you can to make the solution the correct one, but when the decision is made you follow along with the orders of the person who made the decision. And I think that's a philosophy that a lot of military people live with and I think it's a good one, I think it's a valid one.

BUT AIR FORCE WAS NOT COMFORTABLE WITH NOTION WE NEEDED A SURVIVABLE FORCE WAS TO ACTUALLY HAVE A NUCLEAR WAR.

Yes I think that, I think the idea of... of... I think the whole lore that has built up around our strategic balance is primarily created by the intellectual technical people of the last three decades. The Air Force has always gone along with those people and some of them actually exist as Air Force officers. But remember that the military role is not to be philosophical but just to try to have the capability to carry out a mission. So that if the mission is to attack a given number of targets in the Soviet Union, the military person strives to get the where with all of doing that, without regard for the philosophical niceties. So I think that if you looked at the position of the majority of high level people in the Air Force you would say they had focused their attention on that. Rather than on the concerns about the strategic balance. That doesn't mean that there aren't many Air Force people who are very sensitive to these matters. But it just means that the Air Force in general is pushing to be able to accomplish its military mission when a commander in chief orders it to be accomplished.

HOW DID HE FEEL ABOUT VISION OF A LIMITED NUCLEAR WAR?

How did I feel as a person? I was sympathetic to Nixon's cry, you know, that was sort of a primordial scream where he said look, I...I have only two choices, unconditional surrender and turning both the United States and the Soviet Union into rubble. I need something else. And I think what happens is that... if you do these things properly, no weapons are ever used. So you have to, you have to do these calculations and you have to worry about escalation, and you have to decide that you want to be able to thwart the Soviets at any level of violence, in the hope that in being able to do that you will never have to do...thwart the Soviets at any level of violence. So in that sense I believe in the concept of having that capability. Even though my beliefs in how an actual operation conducted on those bases would come out. Or that it would be very hard to make them come out successfully. By successfully I mean, with a minimal destruction on each side. But you have to have that capability. If you don't you're opening yourself up to catastrophic failures in extremis. You know, all these things happened and if everything goes along orderly, then no extremes exist. But if you don't have the capability of doing it that way, then you quickly jump to the extremes and that's incredibly dangerous.

DID YOU THINK THE MPS SYSTEM WOULD WEATHER A NUCLEAR ATTACK, MASSIVE ENOUGH TO TRY TO DESTROY IT, THEN LAUNCH A COUNTER ATTACK?

Well, let's put it this way, we designed it so that it could do that. And since we had designed it so that it could do that, then we had great confidence that that attack would never occur. And that's what we always want to do. We don't want to make it unlikely that that attack will occur. We want to make the likelihood vanishingly small.

BUT MX SILOS WOULD ALREADY BE DESTROYED IN SUCH AN ATTACK. WHAT WOULD THEN BE THE MISSION OF THE MX?

Well there are, that could possibly be true. Some silos are reloadable, which means that those when destroyed would not then be capable of being reloaded so that they could fire again. And there are many other important hard sites which need to be taken out. So that the MX would still be useful even if those silos were empty. But let me turn that around on you and say, those silos will never be empty as long as the Soviets can appreciate that, whether or not they are empty, the retaliation which occurs will be sufficiently damaging that it's intolerable to them. That's the key thing that we're always thinking about. And when you turn it around and turn it into a war and say, What happens if this...if these silos are empty and we attack empty silos. Haven't we wasted our MX? The answer to that really is that, that we have been devastatingly wrong in structuring our strategic forces if that ever happens. In other words, you've lost already.

CIVILIANS TALK ABOUT COUNTERFORCE CAPABILITY OF MX AS BACK UP FOR FIRST USE POLICY IN EUROPE.

Well, you know, there are a lot of arguments being thrown around in the last few years that to me are not necessarily irresponsible, but they don't flow from a base of sound reasoning. And they're contrary to the... the kind of analytic thought that we've had in previous years. And that is contrary to that thought. The idea, the idea is that if we threaten those targets, that increases deterrence. But there's also the counter that if we threaten those targets from a vulnerable basing mode, then what we're really doing is increasing the instability not...de- creasing the instability, not increasing it. So there is a problem there and these, there are other civilians as you know who say, that is very volatile and not very useful to do since if the Soviets can take these targets out without a nuclear attack, it becomes particularly destabilizing.

WHAT IS YOUR HIGHEST PRIORITY?

Well...I was mentioning earlier that the...the MPS was un-aesthetically pleasing. It did use up a lot of territory, the vehicles and the roads and the installations were huge. And so the people who perceived that have been continuously studying new ways to achieve this same objective. As it turns out, our examination of high hardness in the last few years has revealed that concrete and steel is much harder to a nuclear attack than we realized because even though the peak overpressures are enormously high, the amount of actual impulse from the air shot is not that severe. The result is that the hardnesses that are obtainable have increased dramatically. This means that the area that a multiple protective shelter system would now occupy ten years later from the classic MPS is much, much smaller. So there's the possibility of having a system which is conceptually like the MPS but physically very little like the MPS which occupies only a small amount of space. And can be done with reasonable economy. Both the tunnel and the vertical silo systems seem practical for doing this. Now let me quickly say that the single RV...mobile launcher that we're now working on, called Midget-man by some, is certainly a practical solution to the survivability problem, providing that that system is always moving at random so its location can't be known. The problem with that is that a single RV demanding a whole missile just for itself, a whole guidance system just for itself, and a whole carrier vehicle which is hardened too, just for itself, is just inordinately expensive.

ASKS HIS OPINION OF SCOWCROFT COMMITTEE RECOMMENDATION.

I wouldn't like to comment whether I was happy or unhappy about the Scowcroft Commission. I would like to say I thought they did an excellent job of trying to deal with the political exigencies that were mixed in with the technical exigencies. And what they did as I see it that they handed the people who wanted that hard target kill capability desperately, they handed them that system, and then they handed the people who wanted the survivable basing mode minimum retaliatory capability that came with the HML, the hard mobile launcher, that mode, in the hopes that if each could have that which he wanted, that both could go. And what has happened is that only half of the first has been done and the second is in danger of being dropped but merely because of its great expense, rather than because of its impracticality. Because it is a practical, survivable approach. It's just not cost effective.

ASKS HIS OPINION OF RAIL GARRISON.

How do I like it? I am on record as not liking it because it does not deal with all of the parameters required for an intercontinental ballistic missile system. It is not a replacement for an existing capability. It is a new idea which brings in the concept of... deploying on strategic warning. And history shows that people don't deploy on strategic warning for one reason or another. Sometimes they don't get the message, sometimes they misinterpret the message, sometimes they are just inordinately stubborn. But you can cite from Helen of ...from the Trojan horse all the way up to the invasion of Czechoslovakia, you can cite incidents where strategic warning was either not available or if available, was not acted upon. So having systems dependent upon strategic warning are anathema to me. Now others feel differently and I give them credit for having brains in their head. But it just doesn't seem to me the proper way to go.

IS THERE A LESSON TO BE DRAWN FROM STRUGGLE FOR A BASING MODE FOR MX?

Well I could... Yes there are lessons. And that is that in modern times it's very difficult to reach a consensus in this country on matters which affect the populace in a substantive way. There are other lessons to be drawn. I have an Admiral friend who told me the mistake you Air Force guys made was you didn't find your basing mode before you built your missiles. Now we in the submarine force, we found our basing mode and then we built our missiles. And notice that we've had no trouble. I think that's a good lesson but I'm not sure that that lesson applied to the ground base system would actually have worked because the ground base system is on the sovereign soil of the United States, and it involves the people of the United States and their habitat, and whenever that happens you have considerable concerns, and they are hard to deal with.

DID NEED TO HAVE POWERFUL, ACCURATE MIRVED MISSILES WORK AGAINST NECESSITY TO FIND A SURVIVABLE BASING MODE?

Well it may have in a technical way. Obviously you can, you can have the same number of weapons in smaller numbers per missile and still end up with the same number of weapons that you're targeting. But as I said earlier the huge size of the MX missile did mitigate against some of the engineering solutions that we had for mobility.

WAS THERE A TURNING POINT, A KEY MISTAKE THAT CARTER ADMINISTRATION MADE?

I don't think there was a turning point. What happened was that... I believe Harold Brown embraced this as a necessary thing to do and the Carter Administration went about trying to execute the system. And by the time that was done, time was running out for the Carter Administration. It just happened that time ran out and the forcefulness of a...of a Administration late in its tenure, even though it's only the first term, is often reduced by the necessity to be more and more political as the time, as time runs out. But I don't think they made any fatal mistakes. I think this was one of those things that T.S. Eliot would describe, he'd say, "This system didn't die with a bang, it just died with a whimper." Sort of disappeared over the horizon.

WAS IT A BIG MISTAKE TO CHANGE FROM A VERTICAL TO HORIZONTAL SYSTEM?

I just thought it was a technical mistake. You see, you can... it's a, it's something you can analyze. You can say, look, here is what it costs us to make this thing horizontal. In money, in size of the system, in a whole bunch of ways. And you can say, we're wasting X numbers of billions of dollars by making this thing horizontal and we're asking for greater concerns with respect to hardness. And so you can say that, and you can say, and they can say, We understand all that and we want to do it this way, and then you have to say, "Yes sir."

(ONLY FRAGMENT OF QUESTION ON TAPE)

Oh well. The statement I made was given earlier. I was explaining how you traded off hardness against an area of uncertainty. And there area thousand ways to do that. As a result, even though no system emerges which is conceptually really different, even though, you know, the Sea Sitter sounds entirely different from the hard mobile in the Southwest, and yet conceptually it's identically the same. They are trading off uncertainty area for hardness. So there are many, many quote correct solutions unquote to this, this problem. And the cost effectiveness of each if it's only in the realm of being optimum it should be good enough, because technology changes and so on. So it's not a severe mistake if you pick one that's slightly off optimum and go ahead and deploy it. But what I was going to mention about, about this is that it's a very complex and arcane thing and the ingoing assumptions that have been made are usually not known to everyone. And we made ingoing assumptions like minimizing the interface with ...with people not using the oceans since the ocean was the province of the submarine forces. Ingoing constraints like that. And it makes you vulnerable to everybody's idea of what to do. I mean, many of my soldier friends would come to me and say, "I don't understand how you guys could possibly work two years on finding this concept." He said, "I've got the solution. You get these trucks, you put the missiles on the trucks and then you drive them around the streets of America. The Soviets could never know where they're going to be. "And that sort of thing is an example. In fact, Art Buchwald had his, his solution was, Amtrak. We know they'd be safe on Amtrak. Because nobody knows where Amtrak is at any given time. They're never on time and their locations are unknown. And that's obviously...that's not obviously, but it's probably a workable scheme, except that it violates one of the fundamental constraints, is we don't think the American people are going to tolerate having ten megatons of nuclear weapons driving down the railroad tracks in the center of town and pulling into Union Station.

CITES CRITICS WHO ARGUED MPS SYSTEM COULD BE OVERWHELMED.

Yeah, and that argument, I think that argument is specious. If it costs, let's put it this way. Let's imagine a new MPS cost $2 million. It costs the Soviets $2 million to build a new RV. The Soviets sit down and calculate that and they say, every time we build a new RV, those guys are going to build a new shelter. That isn't going to work. So what you have is a successful system. If the new shelter costs $20 and the new RV costs one, then that's a ratio that becomes interesting to the Soviets. But I don't think the calculations upon which Stansfield Turner and Garn, if they made those statements, I don't think those calculations were reliable. Because I think we had good calculations which showed us that it was a wash. And I think the new ideas which really push at reducing the costs of the shelter, have a definite advantage. In other words, the Soviets cannot build a new RV and deploy it for anywhere near the cost that we can build a new area of uncertainty for.