Interviewer: WHY DID CONGRESS ASK THE OFFICE OF TECHNOLOGY ASSESSMENT TO DO A BASIC STUDY FOR MX?
Carter: Well in 1980 the Congress asked the Office of Technology to do a study of all the basing modes for MX because there had been such a great controversy about which basing mode should be selected, in particular because several members of Congress were concerned that because this enormous project -- the largest project in human history -- was going to be constructed in their states, Nevada and Utah, they wanted to know about the environmental impacts and the societal impacts and other things beyond the military value of this deployment.
Carter: So there were two things going on in Congress, some members interested in the military value of the so-called Racetrack basing mode, and others interested in the environmental impact, the social impact, and economic impact in their particular states.
Interviewer: WHAT DID THE OTA STUDY FIND? OR WHAT DID YOU LOOK AT, WHAT ARE SOME OF THE MODES YOU LOOKED AT?
Carter: Well the OTA study was another in a long chain of surveys of the basing question going back to the mid-'60s.
Carter: Everyone knew when missiles were first put in silos that there would come a day when Soviet missiles would be accurate enough and numerous enough that they would be able to destroy our silo based missiles.
Carter: So right from the very beginning there was an effort to find alternatives to the silos.
Carter: And there were a lot of studies done.
Carter: What we did was survey every basing mode anyone had ever thought of.
Carter: And we looked at trenches, we looked at shell games, we looked at airplanes, we looked at boats, we looked at submarines.
Carter: I looked at balloons at one time.
Carter: I studied, designed a balloon to carry around MX missiles.
Carter: Everything that rolled, floated, flew, could be hidden, anything at all we looked at as a potential home for the MX missile.
Carter: We analyzed all of them from a technical and military point of view.
Carter: Would they guarantee the survival of the missile? What might the Soviets be able to do to make the missile vulnerable to spite this basing mode? How much would it cost? And so forth a whole...how would we like it if the Soviets built a comparable system, and so forth.
Carter: And so we looked at all these basing modes according to all these criteria including the Air Force's Racetrack system.
Carter: And we tried to give members of Congress the information that they needed about the strengths and weaknesses of each basing mode so they could make up their own minds about which one they favored.
Interviewer: ASKS OTA'S ASSESSMENT OF THE RACETRACK SCHEME.
Carter: Our assessment was that the system would have about the cost that the Air Force said, and would do about what the Air Force said it, it would do, provided the Soviets couldn't find the missiles, the 200 missiles hidden in the 4,600 holes in the ground.
Carter: We were concerned about that.
Carter: We were concerned about another the, possibility that the Soviets, had which is simply to build more warheads and overwhelm the system.
Carter: And we wondered whether it was a comfortable trade for the United States, every time the Soviet Union built a warhead, for us to have to go out into the desert and pour a big concrete shelter.
Carter: So we concerned, we were concerned about that, and last we were concerned about the environmental impact...in the Great Basin region, the desert region, of a construction project this large.
Interviewer: HOW COULD LOCATION BE DETERMINED BY SOVIETS?
Carter: Oh again we looked at every possible espionage method that the Soviets could use from satellites to agents riding around the desert in Winnebagos crammed with electronic gear.
Carter: We looked at seismic, acoustic, electromagnetic, thermal, chemical, magnetic, all kinds of signatures that a missile might have that would betray its presence in a shelter.
Carter: And in fact the Air Force had done the same thing and had decided to, instead of leaving the shelters that didn't have an MX missile empty, instead they were going to put a dummy in.
Carter: That dummy, the official name for the dummy was a Mass Simulator.
Carter: And so in each cluster of 23 shelters there would be one MX missile and 22 mass simulators.
Carter: And what we found is that gradually we learned that you had to make that mass simulator look more and more like a missile.
Carter: You had to for example paint it with the right paints.
Carter: Because paints have an odor that can be detected with chemical sensors.
Carter: And so you had to use the same paints on the dummy that you used on the missile.
Carter: And so forth.
Carter: So that this thing smelled, looked, tasted and behaved in all ways like an MX missile.
Carter: And that was pretty complicated, and I guess ultimately got rather bizarre.
Interviewer: WHAT OTHER IDEAS WERE CONSIDERED?
Carter: A very popular basing mode at that time was submarine basing for MX.
Carter: And the only objection to that was that we already had submarines with missiles and so proposing submarines cut at the whole heart of the enterprise, from the Air Force's point of view, which was to find something that was not submarines that was as good as submarines.
Carter: Because the Navy had submarines and the Air Force wanted to have an alternative that was just as good.
Carter: So submarines were understandably not popular with the Air Force.
Carter: Technically there was nothing wrong with them, except that they were redundant.
Carter: The submarines we already had.
Carter: We looked at ballistic missile defense.
Carter: Star Wars of...
Carter: much more down to earth literally way.
Carter: When you, where you went out to buy each MX missile and...a little radar and a rocket interceptor.
Carter: Intercepting warheads that were coming.
Carter: We examined launch under attack, the prospect that instead of waiting for the Soviet missiles to arrive at our MX silos, we'd simply launch the missiles.
Carter: And the missiles would survive because they'd never hang around long enough to be hit.
Carter: We looked at putting MX missiles on airplanes.
Carter: Flying them around, and then when you wanted to launch them you pushed the missile out the back of the airplane with a parachute and the missile deployed its parachute and stabilized itself and then slid off its rocket motor and off it went on its journey to the Soviet Union.
Carter: So we looked at a whole, many other basing modes.
Carter: Trucks, trains, all kinds of things.
Carter: But I think it's fair to say that the front runners were, in addition to the Air Force's Racetrack system, the submarine basing mode, the ballistic missile defense mode, the launch under attack mode, and the airplane mode.
Interviewer: ASKS FOR ANECDOTES ABOUT HOW CRITICS RIDICULED THESE SCHEMES.
Carter: Oh there were a whole lot of jokes and, and many, many cartoons.
Carter: And one favorite cartoon of everyones was, had a table that had Brezhnev who was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union at that time, and Uncle Sam, sitting across from one another at a table.
Carter: And Uncle Sam has three shells.
Carter: And he puts a pea under one of the shells and he shuffles around the shells on the table, and then he says to Brezhnev, "Okay, guess which shelter contains the MX missile." And Brezhnev takes out a hammer and goes whack, whack, whack, whack, and hits all of the shells until he finds the one which has the pea in it, which was supposed to be a sign to all of us that if the Soviets wanted to simply overwhelm this system they could.
Interviewer: COULD THEY HAVE?
Carter: They certainly could have built more than 4,600 warheads.
Carter: The question was whether they would be allowed to do so by the SALT II agreement, and the SALT II agreement was constr...well, it's the other way around.
Carter: The basing mode was constructed so that the Soviets could not build enough warheads under SALT II to overwhelm the system.
Carter: Now what that meant was that the survivability of our missiles was in the hands of the Soviets on arms control.
Carter: And there were many who didn't like that idea.
Carter: There with somewhat less justification was a fear that the Soviets might somehow covertly deploy, even under SALT II, more than the requisite number of warheads.
Carter: That was something that wasn't supported very well by intelligence analysis, I don't think, but it was a fear that was around.
Carter: And above all there was the fear that they could somehow figure out which 200 shelters contained the 4,600 MX missiles.
Carter: It was very hard to arrive at a clear judgment on that and I don't think anyone had a judgment.
Carter: What everyone was sure of was that we would be in fear always that they had somehow compromised the shelters, that somewhere an agent, somewhere in the lifetime of this system, the location of these missiles, would be given away.
Carter: No matter how much you tried to compartment it, there would be somewhere in the system a general who wanted every morning to have on his or her desk a list of where the 200 MX missiles were as a sign of, of, that he or she knew what was going on.
Carter: And that somehow despite all the efforts to compartmentalize the information, there would be someway that the Soviets might find out which shelters contained the missiles.
Carter: Of course no one could ever prove that.
Carter: And in fact I think we could have made it very, very difficult for the Soviets to do that.
Carter: And I'll bet they never would have thought that they would have been able to compromise the system.
Carter: But we had to look at it from our point of view, and we had to ask ourselves whether we could live with a system that would keep us in perpetual anxiety about how safe we were.
Interviewer: ASKS ABOUT LAUNCH UNDER ATTACK RATHER THAN DECIDING ON BASING MODES.
Interviewer: WHY NOT DO THAT?
Carter: Launch under attack was by far the cheapest of all the basing modes.
Carter: All you had to do was put the MX missiles out in a silo, and have a satellite or a radar that told you that Soviet missiles were on their way.
Carter: And then all you had to do was push the button.
Carter: So it seemed very simple.
Carter: We asked ourselves two questions though: one was whether we could construct a system of warning sensors, communications and launch control procedures, that would guarantee us that we could launch those missiles despite Soviet efforts to interrupt that process.
Carter: In other words, they might attack our warning sensors, they might try to interrupt the communications, to somehow get us confused or delayed, so that in that precious half hour, which is the flight time of Soviet missiles, to the United States, we would somehow not be able to get our missiles out of the silo.
Carter: We...
Carter: satisfied ourselves, at least I satisfied myself, that we could construct a system that the Soviets couldn't disrupt.
Carter: With reasonable confidence.
Carter: What I was unable to convince myself of was that a system, a hair trigger system like that would be a safe thing for the United States to have.
Carter: It's...a little sporty to deploy a system of thousands of --
Carter: What I wasn't able to convince myself of was that the United States could safely operate a hair-trigger system over such a long period of time.
Carter: One worried that a system like that would be prone somehow to accident.
Carter: You never wanted a situation where you accidentally launched, thinking that you were under heavy Soviet attack and had no choice.
Carter: And so we were very reluctant to build that hair trigger in.
Carter: Let me just remind you what that half hour looks like, that half hour flight time of a Soviet ICBM to the United States.
Carter: Let's suppose that at high noon the Soviets launched their missile, their missiles at our missiles.
Carter: Well, within a minute or two we...our warning systems would pick that information up, that the missiles were launched.
Carter: That information would be pretty much immediately conveyed to the United States.
Carter: There it would have to be processed and a message would have to go to the President, who might be in the men's room or somewhere else.
Carter: The President would not want to make a decision on the basis of early information.
Carter: He or she would want confirmation.
Carter: So...he or she would wait, and about 15 minutes later confirmation would begin to come in from radars, the earlier information from satellites.
Carter: Now there are only 15 minutes left.
Carter: At this very moment when con, confirming information comes in, Soviet submarine-launched ballistic missiles begin to detonate over Washington.
Carter: Potentially wipe out the President and all the leadership.
Carter: So someone who is hidden somewhere has to assume command.
Carter: Let's suppose that he or she decides to launch the MX missiles.
Carter: Then the message has to go out to the silos, the silo crews have to go through their procedures of putting in their keys, turning their keys, going through the launch sequence.
Carter: Silo door opens and the missile has to escape before the warheads come into its vicinity.
Carter: Well, when you back up from the end of that time line and look at all the things that have to be done before the missiles are launched, and you come forward from the Soviet launch at all the things that a leader would want to do to check that the information that he had available to him was correct, in between those two is the decision time.
Carter: And that decision time ranged anywhere from zero to five minutes.
Carter: Well that isn't a lot of time for a national leadersh...leader to make a decision about the launching of hundreds and hundreds of megatons of nuclear force.
Carter: And we thought it was unreasonable for us to put national political leaders in a position where the...in order to execute their responsibilities they had to make awesome decisions between a couple of minutes.
Carter: That was unreasonable and by and large people were unwilling to put the President through that.
Carter: Now we didn't conclude that.
Carter: We did the technical analysis and spelled that out.
Carter: But overall the reaction of most people that we briefed was "I hope we don't ever resort to launch under attack."
Interviewer: PRESIDENT WOULD NOT BE AROUND FOR THAT SCENARIO, HE WOULD HAVE HAD TO GET OUT OF TOWN TO AVOID SUBMARINE ATTACK?
Carter: The President would either have to be hidden somewhere at the time of attack, somewhere outside of Washington where he couldn't be attacked.
Carter: Or he could be flying in one of his Doomsday airplanes, the National Emergency Airborne Command Post, the NECAP aircraft, or somewhere elsewhere he couldn't come in, under attack.
Carter: Or he would have to delegate his launch authority to someone, a civilian subordinate or a military commander who was in a position to survive the initial Soviet barrage of warheads.
Carter: Obviously procedures like that stress our constitutional system of civilian control and presidential succession.
Carter: And so there are reasons of political propriety also for objecting to launch under attack.
Interviewer: WITH LAUNCH UNDER ATTACK SCENARIO, WHAT WOULD OUR MISSILES BE TARGETED ON?
Carter: Well that was a good question that people asked.
Carter: Remember there was...because we had plenty of MX missiles deployed, the only reason to launch them under attack was if they were all about to be destroyed.
Carter: So only if there were a large Soviet attack would you even contemplate launch under attack.
Carter: And what that meant was you were already in a big nuclear war.
Carter: And so you were a lot less picky about what kinds of targets you struck on the Soviet side.
Carter: Obviously there was no point in striking Soviet silos because they had just emptied their silos on you.
Carter: They might have a few left but you didn't know which way, which they were.
Carter: And so you tended to attack their military bases, their industrial facilities, their command posts and so forth.
Carter: In other words you are in a big war, this all out war and the missiles that were launched under attack are launched at the heart of, of Soviet society.
Carter: Which makes it all the more dangerous if by any, for any reason, they were ever launched mistakenly.
Carter: It also means though that there's no need to launch under attack unless you are under heavy-attack.
Carter: And so the real problem is that you, that the United States would somehow mistake a small Soviet attack which didn't require launch under attack, for a larger attack.
Carter: And we would needlessly launch a massive retaliation to a small Soviet attack.
Interviewer: ONE OF THE PURPOSES OF MX WAS TO PROVIDE CAPABILITY FOR LIMITED NUCLEAR OPTIONS, TO BE ABLE TO PICK AND CHOOSE A NUMBER OF LIMITED TARGETS.
Interviewer: HOW DID THIS COINCIDE WITH OTHER PURPOSE--TO WITHSTAND MASSIVE ATTACK?
Carter: Well they really don't have anything to do with one another, those two requirements on, on MX.
Carter: On the one hand the MX was sought for the purposes of limited nuclear war, which is a theoretical construct, and some doubt that it has any reality.
Carter: But in any event, if it does have reality, it refers to the use of very small numbers of nuclear weapons from very selective strikes.
Carter: Under those circumstances a very limited nuclear war, you don't need to worry about the survivability of MX missiles, because they were only vulnerable to massive attack on all their silos.
Carter: So you could imagine having a force of missiles that, whose purpose was limited nuclear war, that didn't have to be survivable, because by definition limited nuclear war doesn't involve massive attacks on silos.
Carter: And another force which was very survivable, which was not as capable as the MX force.
Carter: So with the MX force we were trying to combine two missions that were completely separate—the small, limited precision was on the one hand, and the all-out massive war on the other.
Carter: We're trying to do both jobs with one thing, and of course we ended up doing neither job very well.
Interviewer: DO THESE TWO MISSIONS FOR THE MX EXPLAIN THE DIFFICULTY OVER TIME IN FINDING A HOME FOR IT?
Carter: Yeah, I think absolutely.
Carter: There were those who were opposed to the missile itself because of its role in offensive theory.
Carter: And they were basically didn't want to have the MX missile at all.
Carter: And if they had to have it, by God they at least wanted it to be survivable.
Carter: There were others who wanted the MX missile precisely because of its offensive capabilities.
Carter: And reckoned that we had enough other survivable missiles, tor example our submarine-launched missiles.
Carter: They wanted to build MX for limited nuclear war and they didn't really care that much about survivability.
Carter: So you had a missile that was being bought by two different parties and the joke was that one party was buying the front end of the missile, and the other was buying the back end, the basing mode.
Carter: Two completely different communities of people, very different philosophies, and the Racetrack system was an attempt at a compromise between fundamentally disparate requirements.
Interviewer: WAS THE WINDOW OF VULNERABILITY IDEA OVERSOLD TO GET CONGRESS TO BUY A NEW MISSILE THAT WAS INVULNERABLE?
Carter: No, I think there were people who were genuinely concerned about the so-called window of vulnerability.
Carter: I must say that I was not among them, and yet I worked very hard on the MX missile and basing modes for the MX missile, and I did it for two other reasons.
Carter: The first was that I thought that if we were going to deploy any more offensive missiles it was essential for us to base them survivably.
Carter: I didn't want to see MX missiles in silos -- I thought that did more harm than good.
Carter: Second, I thought that in the long run, it was not an emergency, there was no window of vulnerability, we were not in any danger.
Carter: In the long run it was wise of us to take the time and the money and the intellectual effort to find an alternative to submarines as a way of being sure that the Soviets could never disarm us, because that would be very dangerous.
Carter: So it was not essential that we do it in the 1980s.
Carter: For all we know our submarines are just fine.
Carter: But someday we'd like to have an alternative.
Interviewer: CITES SCOTTY RESTON ARTICLE THAT JOKINGLY STATED WE ARE NOT GOING TO BASE MXS DECEPTIVELY, BUT INSTEAD MAKE 250 FAKE PENTAGONS AND CART THEM AROUND ON THE NATION'S HIGHWAYS.
Interviewer: DOES IT MAKE SENSE THAT THE MX COULD WITHSTAND AN ATTACK AND RETALIATE WHEN THE COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEMS WERE SO VULNERABLE? COULD THEY HAVE?
Carter: Well that's a very good question.
Carter: There's no point in making the body of the nuclear forces strong if the nervous system is weak.
Carter: In other words, there is no point in having missiles which themselves will survive Soviet attack if the wherewithal to launch them won't survive.
Carter: Then all the Soviets have to do is destroy the wherewithal to launch them, which is called the command and control system.
Carter: And there was not as much attention given to the survivability of the command and control system as there was to the survivability of MX missiles themselves.
Carter: That was an imbalance which existed at the time.
Carter: Which still exists but which is getting better.
Carter: People are paying more attention to that question of command and control and over time I think we're doing a little better.
Interviewer: WHAT WOULD YOU SAY TO THOSE WHO SAID MX WAS A FIRST-STRIKE MISSILE BECAUSE THERE ARE 200...WHAT WOULD THEY AIM AT IF THEY WAITED FOR A SOVIET ATTACK?
Carter: Well I would have sympathized with them in that the numbers were larger than one needed for any possible limited use.
Interviewer: CAN YOU START OVER...?
Carter: I agreed with people who thought that 200 MX missiles -- which meant 2,000 hard target killing warheads -- would only increase anxiety on the Soviet side about the survivability of their own forces, I could understand an argument that called for us to deploy a smaller number of MX missiles as a...for this theoretical, limited nuclear war purpose.
Carter: Which I understand their objections to, but at least that was a rational purpose.
Carter: I could also understand people who wanted to deploy MX missiles survivably.
Carter: But anyone who wanted to deploy 200 MX missiles and didn't care about survivability could only have had in mind targeting those missiles on Soviet silos.
Carter: And I thought that that was unnecessary and ultimately a futile thing to do, because all it would do was induce the Soviets to worry about their own survivability.
Carter: And that didn't get anyone ahead.
Carter: So I could understand reasons to buy MX missiles, and I could understand reasons to base MX missiles survivably, but the peculiar mixture that we had, I don't think was to anyone's liking.
Interviewer: WE WANTED TO BASE MISSILES IN UTAH AND NEVADA BECAUSE OF THEORIES OF LIMITED NUCLEAR WAR.
Interviewer: WAS THAT THE CRUX OF THE PROBLEM, TRYING TO MAKE THOSE THEORIES WORK?
Carter: Well again, I think that there was a compromise going on here between fundamentally different attitudes.
Carter: People who had been happy to put MX missiles in silos.
Carter: They didn't care whether they were survivable because they didn't intend to use them in all out war.
Carter: They only intended to use them for selective, limited nuclear strikes.
Carter: That's one camp of people who believe in strikes like that.
Carter: There's another camp of people who want above all to have survivable deterrent forces for all out war.
Carter: Really, logic would dictate that we build two entirely different missile systems to satisfy those two camps, but we didn't want to do that.
Carter: We tried to satisfy both camps with one system and that was impossible, and it led to the Rube Goldberg...
Carter: unpopular, massively expensive Racetrack proposal, which ultimately was politically defeated.
Carter: In the course of defeating it, of course, both parties lost even the legitimate claims they had on a new missile system.
Interviewer: ASKS ABOUT REAGAN'S STEPPING INTO THIS FRAY.
Carter: From where I sat, and it was widely reported in the press at that time, it was pretty clear that Secretary Weinberger was not at all in favor of the Racetrack basing mode.
Carter: Senators Garn and Laxalt were from Utah and Nevada respectively, conservative, Republican friends of President Reagan, They were both upset at having the Racetrack in their states.
Carter: They are very pro-defense people but they didn't like this system.
Carter: And so it was pretty clear early in the Administration despite the attempts of some Carter Administration holdovers to keep the MX Racetrack program going, that it was going to die.
Interviewer: ARE WE CORRECT IN CALLING IT RACETRACK, DIDN'T THEY CHANGE IT TO MPS?
Carter: What would you like me to -- I'll call it the Mobile Protective Shelter system, I just thought it was a mouthful.
Carter: What do you want me to call it? I've already used Racetrack a few times...
Interviewer: YOU WEREN'T ON THE FIRST TOWNES PANEL, RIGHT? BUT YOU WERE CALLED IN FOR THE SECOND ONE?
Carter: Yes.
Carter: The first Townes Panel, so-called, named after physicist Charles Townes who discovered the laser, was assembled by Secretary Weinberger in the first year of the Reagan Administration to look at all the basing modes.
Carter: This the 20th or 30th time all of the basing modes had been looked at.
Carter: And to pick their favorite, the least rotten apple in the barrel as everyone said.
Carter: And that first Townes Panel basically didn't conclude anything.
Carter: It didn't come out with a clear favorite at all.
Carter: And that led to a year of frustration within the Administration, ultimately to the second Townes Panel, which looked at Dense Pack, which also ended in frustration.
Carter: And finally the Scowcroft Commission, which was not a technical panel but a political panel, was assembled to get rid of this political nightmare once and for all for the Reagan Administration.
Carter: And damn survivability, and damn the MX missile, and damn the whole project.
Carter: Let's just get it off the, the political scoreboard here, so that the Administration didn't take the terrible beating that it had been getting.
Interviewer: WHERE DID DENSE PACK COME FROM, AND WHY WAS IT SO SUDDENLY PROPOSED WHEN A NUMBER OF PEOPLE, INCLUDING CHARLES TOWNES HIMSELF, WERE SO SKEPTICAL ABOUT THE IDEA?
Carter: Dense pack...
Carter: was an idea that had been floating around in rudimentary form for a while, but no one took it seriously.
Carter: It suddenly took off because it had all of the right ingredients.
Carter: It took up very little land, it densely packed all the missiles, so instead of strewing them out all over the countryside, you only had them in one little lot.
Carter: It was cheap because you only built silos for the missiles.
Carter: You didn't build 23 silos for every missile, you only built one.
Carter: So it had the advantage of seemingly pleasing everyone.
Carter: It was survivable, it was clever.
Carter: It was ...
Carter: cheap and it didn't take up much land.
Carter: The only problem was that as near as we could tell it might not work.
Carter: In other words we couldn't quite satisfy ourselves that the basic method whereby Dense Pack survived, which was to have the first Soviet warhead that approached the Dense Pack, when it went off, destroy all the other Soviet warheads so that they couldn't destroy their silos and the missiles survived.
Carter: That that mechanism called fratricide, one brother warhead kills another brother warhead, that wouldn't quite do it, that wouldn't guarantee survivability.
Carter: And so there were many people in the technical community who were concerned that we were so desperate for a basing mode for MX that we were about to leap upon this unproven and possibly quite flawed basing mode, I think Congress saw the same thing.
Carter: The Department of Defense flailing about in desperation, and they never really gave us the chance to answer the question of whether dense pack would work or not.
Carter: They killed it immediately.
Interviewer: WAS COMMISSION SET UP TO GET MXS PUT SOMEWHERE?
Carter: It was a commission set up above all to get the Reagan Administration out of this terrible fix they were in, where everybody was asking them everyday how they were going to base the MX missile.
Carter: And they had no good solutions.
Carter: Every time they picked one, everyone reacted with disgust.
Carter: It was very frustrating for them.
Carter: So in effect the Presidential commission was to be bipartisan and the President was going to say, "All right.
Carter: I'm sick of getting criticized.
Carter: You guys go out and figure out how to do this.
Carter: And I'll go along with whatever you can get the American people to go along with.
Carter: "And that was the bottom line.
Carter: Now it was...embarrassing I suppose, for an Administration to have to admit that it couldn't handle the situation itself and have to turn to the Presidential Commission.
Carter: And there were those...I suppose Secretary Weinberger was one of them, who felt miffed to have this commission that had his predecessor as Secretary of Defense coming in to clean up the mess that he couldn't fix.
Carter: Now in fairness to him, this was a difficult question and every time he picked a basing mode, half the country would rebel against it.
Carter: So it was a difficult problem.
Carter: Still, it was a sign, it was an admission of impotence for the Administration to convene the Scowcroft Commission.
Carter: And I think the Scowcroft Commission looked its job like a dentist putting novocaine into a sore tooth.
Carter: The chief thing was to stop the national anguish over MX.
Carter: And the merits of the case, that is where the MX missile ended up, they thought was of secondary importance.
Carter: They thought in particular that the window of vulnerability had been exaggerated, which I agree with.
Carter: That there was no urgency about deploying the missiles survivably.
Carter: And they made another argument as well about why MX, even if deployed in silos, wasn't such a catastrophe from the point of view of survivability.
Interviewer: ASKS HIM TO SUMMARIZE ANSWER ABOUT REAGAN AND SCOWCROFT.
Carter: Well, so the Scowcroft Commission's purpose was to help the Reagan Administration get out of this terrible bind, where they couldn't find a good basing mode that was both acceptable to the technical community and acceptable to the country at large.
Carter: And they said to the Scowcroft Commission, go out and find a basing mode and if you can get the rest of the country to live with it, why we'll live with it too.
Carter: Basically they were punting...the issue...to the Scowcroft Commission.
Interviewer: WHY WAS IT SUDDENLY OK, WHY WAS WINDOW OF VULNERABILITY CLOSED?
Carter: Well I think those who had originally believed in the window of vulnerability either changed their mind or had never believed in it to begin with.
Carter: My own view was that it was always an exaggeration, a terrible exaggeration, to say that the United States was anywhere near to being able to be disarmed by the Soviet Union.
Carter: So I never thought that the window of vulnerability was ray reason for working on the MX missile and working on the basing modes.
Carter: I never believed in that.
Carter: At the same time I welcomed at least the frankness and directness of the Scowcroft Commission in dispelling the window of vulnerability.
Carter: Now at the same time they based the MX missile in silo, which I thought, was a sad and pathetic end to our earnest and well-intentioned and very principled efforts over the years to find a survivable basing mode for MX.
Carter: And I objected to that, I thought we could have done better.
Interviewer: IN SILOS, WERE WE STILL RELYING ON LAUNCH UNDER ATTACK IN ORDER TO GET THE MISSILES OFF?
Carter: Well...in effect, the Scowcroft Commission did say that we would have to rely on launch under attack.
Carter: They didn't quite say it that way.
Carter: They said that putting MX in silos presented the Soviet Union with a difficult problem.
Carter: The Soviet Union, if it was going to disarm the United States, would have to destroy our ICBMs and our bombers.
Carter: Of course they'd have to destroy our submarines too and they left that part out.
Carter: To destroy the bombers, the Soviets, the best attack that they can mount against the bombers is the surprise attack from submarines off U.S.
Carter: coasts.
Carter: So that the airheads arrive very quickly before the planes can take off.
Carter: If the Soviets launched that kind of attack from submarines, then they give away the game about the attack on ICBMs. In other words, they tip us off that the ICBM attack which takes much longer to arrive, is on its way.
Carter: So they make launch under attack easier.
Carter: And so the Scowcroft Commission said that the MX in silos faces the Soviets with this difficult choice.
Carter: They can't attack the submarine...the bombers and the ICBMs both.
Carter: That's only true if we're prepared to adopt launch under attack as a operational doctrine for the MX missiles and that's something that's quite dangerous.
Carter: So implicitly the Scowcroft Commission did endorse launch under attack.
Interviewer: ASKS ABOUT THEIR MIDGETMAN RECOMMENDATION.
Carter: The Scowcroft Commission had three elements.
Carter: Basically designed to please everyone.
Carter: First, the MX missiles would go into silos.
Carter: Second, since that didn't solve the survivability problem, we would build another missile and build that, and base that survivably.
Carter: That's Midgetman.
Carter: And third, we would enter into nego...into arms control negotiations with the Soviets which the Reagan Administration at that time was saying were not in U.S.
Carter: interests.
Carter: Well as we know, the miss...the MX missiles went into silos and the other two parts still have not happened.
Carter: So the Scowcroft Commission really was a failure in the sense that only one third of what it attempted to do actually came to pass.
Carter: But nevertheless the Midgetman missile might ultimately be built.
Carter: It's a very expensive way of survivably basing missiles.
Carter: I regret its great cost but I don't think it's a terrible mistake to go ahead and build it.
Carter: I only hope that it ultimately will be built.
Carter: I'm not sure it will because it's so expensive.
Interviewer: DO YOU THINK WE SHOULD BUILD THE OTHER 50 MX AND PUT THEM ON THE RAIL GARRISON AS THE AIR FORCE IS HOPING?
Carter: Putting another 50 MX missiles on rail garrison is probably better than putting them into silos.
Carter: At the same time I don't see particularly why we need those 100 MX missiles from the point of view of meeting our offensive targeting needs.
Carter: And if we're going to have Midgetman which will be survivable anyway, it's hard to understand why we need the 50 MX missiles on rail garrison.
Carter: And if given the choice between the rail garrison and the Midgetman, I would think that apart from cost, everything favors Midgetman.
Interviewer: WHAT ARE FUTURE THREATS TO SURVIVABILITY? ...THE PROBLEM WITH MIDGETMAN IS IF THE SOVIETS COULD MAKE MANEUVERABLE RE-ENTRY VEHICLES THEN CONCEIVABLY THEY COULD RE-TARGET AS THE MIDGETMEN MOVE AROUND.
Interviewer: DO WE HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT THIS COUNTERFORCE TECHNOLOGY ARMS RACE?
Carter: Yeah, I think we do have to worry -- ultimately that Midgetman will itself prove vulnerable.
Carter: Now the hard part about Midgetman, which is a missile on a truck, roaming around the desert, the hard part about that is for the Soviets to attack it is finding them.
Carter: It's not so hard to attack them.
Carter: So we have to worry about Soviet reconnaissance, particularly from space, and having the ability to track the trucks that carry the missiles.
Carter: And ultimately that will be the problem.
Carter: I think that it's a...few years in the future before we have to really worry about that problem.
Carter: And we can do a lot of things to make the Soviets concerned about their ability to see them and target them.
Carter: We can interfere with their satellites, we can threaten to destroy their satellites, early in any kind of war, just to make sure that they will not be able to destroy our missiles.
Interviewer: IF THIS IS A TECHNOLOGY RACE, IN COUNTERFORCE, THE THEORY IS WE NEED TO PUT EACH SIDE'S FORCES IN A VULNERABLE SITUATION.
Interviewer: IS THERE EVER ANY END TO THAT? IF EACH SIDE NEEDS TWO WARHEADS TO ATTACK THE OTHER SIDE'S, HOW DO YOU EVER GET ON TOP OF THE SITUATION?
Carter: Well, you're right, there's a never ending race between measure and counter-measure, offense and defense, in trying, in trying to protect strategic forces.
Carter: And I think ultimately it will not be technology but restraint on the two sides that will allow us to have survivable missiles.
Carter: In other words we will both cease to make strenuous efforts to threaten the other sides' missiles because to do so only increases their insecurity, which ought to increase our insecurity.
Carter: And I think in fact you see that.
Carter: We have not done everything we could have to threaten Soviet silos.
Carter: We are both now discussing a START agreement which would deliberately, bilaterally, mutually blunt the ability that each side has to threaten the other side's missiles.
Carter: So slowly it's sinking in that it's not such a good thing to be trying to threaten one another's missiles.
Carter: And that...piece of good sense, I think, is much more promising than any breakthrough in technology, one way or the other.
Interviewer: JAMES SCHLESINGER ARGUES, AND I THINK THIS WAS IN THE REFLECTED ALSO IN THE SCOWCROFT REPORT, THAT THE ONLY WAY WE CAN BACK UP OUR NUCLEAR GUARANTEES TO THE EUROPEANS IS TO HAVE A CREDIBLE FIRST-STRIKE, HARD TARGET KILL WEAPON.
Carter: I think it's important to have a credible way to use nuclear weapons to interdict a Soviet conventional attack on Europe.
Carter: I don't see...so I want to have missiles that we can use first to attack targets in the Soviet Union.
Carter: I don't understand the logic that says we have to have the ability to destroy Soviet missiles in their silos.
Carter: That's a different target set.
Carter: That's asking for them to go to launch under attack, that's asking to make a small nuclear war into an all-out nuclear war, when the whole purpose of U.S.
Carter: strategy is to use nuclear weapons to intercede in a limited way in a conventional way and stop the Soviet Union from defeating us in Europe.
Carter: So I don't understand what silo-killing warheads have to do with the argument which I think has merit that the United States continues to rely on nuclear weapons to get it out of a military fix in Europe.
Carter: But the targets we're talking about there are bridges, Soviet tank concentrations, and communication centers.
Carter: We're not talking about silos in the Soviet Union that contain nuclear missiles.
Carter: We're talking about Soviet conventional forces.
Interviewer: DO YOU THINK THE AIR FORCE, AND THE MILITARY, IS TALKING ABOUT KILLING SILOS, AND IS THERE A DIFFERENCE THEN IN HOW PEOPLE THINK OF USING THESE WEAPONS?
Carter: Yes, I think the military is interested in targeting Soviet forces but you have to understand that's not their decision.
Carter: They get targeting guidance from the senior civilians, which says that the most important targets in the Soviet Union are Soviet silos.
Carter: And if there were civilian leaders who wanted to say, "listen forget about Soviet silos, don't try to hit them because first of all you can't destroy all the Soviet nuclear forces and second you'll just turn them to launch under attack or something.
Carter: "Instead target Soviet targets that might actually, might actually be useful or in the US interest to destroy in a war.
Carter: It's not in our interest to threaten Soviet silos.
Carter: Nevertheless we have had for a long time guidance to the military requiring them to attack Soviet nuclear forces.
Carter: That's a holdover from the 1950s when we had the capability to attack Soviet nuclear forces.
Carter: But that guidance is outdated now.
Interviewer: WHAT ABOUT GUIDANCE TO DESTROY THEIR COMMAND AND CONTROL?
Carter: Well it's very dangerous if you want to contain the scope of a war and terminate it before both sides use all of their arsenals to attack the other side's command system.
Carter: Unless you're sure you can route it out and wipe it out.
Carter: Stun them into inaction.
Carter: I don't believe we have that capability today and I know they don't have that capability against us.
Carter: And so, all you can achieve by attacking their command system is to make it so that not General Secretary Gorbachev but some lower ranking, narrower individual, with less experience at leadership in other countries, ends up making decisions on the Soviet side.
Carter: It's hard to see how that's in our interest.
Carter: So, if on the other hand you're going to have an all-out nuclear war, I guess you might as well go all out and attack their leadership too and do the best you can.
Carter: But I don't think that's our purpose.
Carter: We've always said that if we use nuclear weapons we want to bring a nuclear war to a halt as soon as possible.
Carter: And if we're going to do that, we'd better damned well have leaders on the other side that we can do that with.
Carter: So I don't see any point in making it a priority to attack the Soviet command system except in the circumstances of all out war when you might as well go for broke.
Interviewer: ASKS ABOUT FRUSTRATION POLITICIANS HAVE ABOUT EGGHEADS WHO SIT AROUND AND DISCUSS SCENARIOS.
Carter: Yeah there certainly was a discontinuity in tone in the Administration in going from the Carter Administration to the Reagan Administration.
Carter: You went from Jimmy Carter and Harold Brown, his Secretary of Defense, both scientists and analysts, to Reagan and Weinberger, both politicians.
Carter: And Reagan and Weinberger it seems to me got quite frustrated with this endless technical quest for the right basing mode for MX.
Carter: It made them unpopular, it was senseless.
Carter: It led to things that they, like the public at large, perceived to be rather bizarre, like 4,600 holes in the ground.
Carter: So in this, in this respect they were much more like the led than like the leaders in their attitudes towards nuclear weapons.
Carter: And of course that became a lot clearer later on when President Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative.
Carter: It became a lot clearer that President Reagan, like the average American was getting pretty fed up with all of these eggheads and intellectuals babbling about stability and Racetrack and Dense Pack and warhead limits and SALT and all that.
Carter: And he said, "I don't want to deal with all that complexity.
Carter: I want to not be vulnerable.
Carter: So let me go out and build a shield and so forth." Well that's another story.
Carter: But I think it illustrates the sense in which the Reagan Administration mirrored the frustration and sense of impotence that the country as a whole had over MX and the nuclear predicament.
Interviewer: ASKS ABOUT REACTION TO EGGHEADS...
Carter: President Reagan and his advisers, unlike President Carter and his advisers, Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, approached these matters much more like ordinary citizens, than like technical experts.
Carter: Carter and Brown would pore over the charts and the viewgraphs, they were both scientists, both experts.
Carter: Reagan and Weinberger were much more like ordinary citizens.
Carter: They were befuddled and a little bit annoyed with all of the talk about Dense Pack and Racetrack and re-entry vehicles.
Carter: And this kind of limited and that kind of limited arms control.
Carter: They realized the public was confused and frustrated with all of this.
Carter: They were confused and frustrated.
Carter: And what you saw at the time of the Scowcroft Commission was them assembling a group of experts to deal with MX.
Carter: But President Reagan and Secretary Weinberger were elsewhere.
Carter: They were thinking about SDI which they were hatching at that time.
Carter: And which was a repudiation of all of the theology that the experts were propounding.
Carter: And they wanted to get away from this enormously frustrating problem of the MX missile, from the Peace movement and the Catholic bishops and all of this criticism that they were taking, about a system that they too thought was bizarre.
Carter: And rather than apologize and tell the public in lecture expert terms how good all this was for them and how sensible it was, President Reagan and Secretary Weinberger instead hatched SDI as their solution.
Carter: And thereby repudiated all of the eggheads and all of the experts and went off their own way.
Carter: And took the American public with them.
Interviewer: ASKS HIM TO REPEAT PART OF ANSWER.
Carter: President Reagan and Secretary Weinberger conceived the Strategic Defense Initiative, a shield that would end the vulnerability of people and missiles, once and for all.
Carter: That was their solution, both to the basing problem for MX, and to the Peace Movement, and to the Catholic Bishops, all the criticism and all the anxiety and all the confusion and the frustration with expertise that was abroad in the country at that time.
Carter: And off they went with SDI.
Carter: And they took all of the American public with them, and left the experts, like the Scowcroft Commission -- and me I suppose -- sitting by ourselves with our basing modes.
Interviewer: WHAT WAS WRONG -- THE NITZE SCENARIO THAT POSTULATED THAT THE SOVIETS WOULD TAKE OUT OUR LAND-BASED WARHEADS AND LEAVE US HELPLESS AND BLACKMAILED, AND OTHER PEOPLE SAID, "COME ON YOU'RE LOOKING AT A LIMITED NUCLEAR WAR SCENARIO THAT'S JUST ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS.
Interviewer: LOOK AT THE FALLOUT THAT WOULD SPREAD ACROSS THE UNITED STATES..." OTA DID A STUDY OF LIMITED NUCLEAR WAR AT THE TIME, WHAT WERE THE FINDINGS?
Carter: The findings of all analyses of the effects on American society of nuclear strikes, have been that for the Soviet Union to attempt to attack only our nuclear forces -- no other military targets, no cities, no factories, but only our silos, our submarine bases, our bomber bases, and our command and control -- would kill anywhere from two to 20 million Americans promptly.
Carter: And millions more by delayed effects.
Carter: Now it's hard to call that a limited nuclear war.
Carter: And I think most people are rather inclined to think that if nuclear war breaks...ever breaks out, God forbid, it will either be very, very small, the use of rela...very small numbers.
Carter: Tens, maybe as many as 100 nuclear weapons, not against cities, but against military targets, or it's going to be a much larger scale war in which the entire populace and maybe the enti..all of material culture will be embroiled.
Carter: So real nuclear wars divide into the very small and the very large and there right parked in the middle you have the Nitze scenario which is a war that's too big to be a limited nuclear war, and too small to be a serious war.
Carter: Geez, if the Soviets are going to attack our silos and bomber bases and submarine bases and everything, presumably they're not going to stop there.
Carter: That's like tweaking the tiger's tail.
Carter: If you're going to do that much damage to the other country, why would you stop there? You'd go all out.
Carter: So, the Nitze scenario is, to my mind, in the Never Never Land between truly limited nuclear wars and all out nuclear wars.
Carter: And there are few analysts and a few theoretically minded civilians that live there, but no one else lives there and in particular the military organizations don't live there.
Carter: Don't believe in that.
Carter: They might believe in the limited, truly limited nuclear wars, and they certainly believe in the all out nuclear wars.
Carter: But these esoteric analysts' constructs in between I think have very few adherents apart from theorists.
Interviewer: I'M GOING TO ASK YOU TO SHOW THIS NUMBER IWHT THIS CALCULATOR...
Carter: Well this is the famous circular slide rule and every strategic analyst in the world had one of these, even political scientists as opposed to scientists could use them.
Carter: And anybody by turning this wheel and setting it to the Soviet yield of their warheads and the hardness and pounds per square inch of a U.S.
Carter: silo, could calculate that as the Soviet accuracy of their missiles came down from several thousand feet to the neighborhood of a thousand feet, that the probability of destroying a Minuteman silo in a single shot got up in the area of 70, 80 and 90 percent.
Carter: So everybody who could operate one of these bizarre little circular slide rules came to understand that if the Soviets had the accuracy that we were ascribing to them, Minuteman was becoming vulnerable.