ASKS HIS COMMAND IN JUNE OF 1975.

Well actually not a command but a staff position. I had been commanding two SAC bombardment wings, B-52 wings. In June of '75 I went to Strategic Air Command Headquarters and became a... the senior planner, working for General Russ Dougherty at the time.

WHAT WAS HIS JOB?

Well the planner at SAC has responsibility for a number of planning activities, probably the most importantly is the modernization of the forces. Responsibility for developing the operational requirements for new equipment and overseeing the bringing of that equipment into operational use.

HOW DID HE GET INVOLVED WITH MX?

Well the MX missile program had just begun. The act... the operational requirement had been validated in 1972. And in 1974 work had begun, very embryonic work on what was called the concept definition, what was it going to look like. Not only the missile but the basing mode, the operational requirement specified a survivable basing mode as well. That would have consisted mostly of paper studies of what are, what are the alternatives and which ones looked like they made sense and so forth. That began in, in 1974. I was following that work most of which was done by a systems command. And that led then to the first review by the Defense Systems Acquisition Review Council in 1976 which authorized us to proceed with the first phase of concept validation.

ASKS OPERATIONAL REQUIREMENTS.

Well there was a set of requirements for a missile which was looking at a missile considerably larger than the existing Minuteman with up to ten warheads. A missile with considerably more accuracy than had been known before. And also a basing mode of something other than a silo that would provide survivability in the event the Soviets developed and deployed accurate ICBMs that could threaten the silos.

WHERE DID ACCURACY/LARGE SIZE AND SURVIVABILITY CONSIDERATIONS COME FROM?

Well the size is really not important. That's an economic issue. You could build a larger number of small missiles with the same effect but it would cost more money. And so that was economics. As the Soviets were deploying more and more of their resource in very hard silos, from a military point of view that, that's something that they obviously value a great deal. And it's part of the concept of deterrence. You would like to hold those at risk to pose some potential threat to them. That was the military requirement for the increased capability of the missile. The other side of the coin was that we didn't want our new MX missile itself to be threatened by the Russian missiles. So we were looking for a basing mode that would make it survivable for the foreseeable future.

WHY WAS THAT A NEW CONCERN?

There was a limit to what could be... we had modernized the Minuteman. We had gone from a Minuteman I to a Minuteman II to a Minuteman III. We had hardened the silos to the extent that it was possible. We had improved the communications and command and control of those missiles. Really had gone about as far as could be, you know, in a practical sense with the Minuteman. Meanwhile the Soviets were building and deploying very large numbers of missiles, meaning that if there was no corresponding action on our part the nuclear balance was going to continue to shift adversely in our favor. Remembering that starting in 1945 the United States initially had a monopoly on nuclear weapons. For a long period of time had a dominant or vastly superior position. But by the mid–'70s we had reached or were about to reach a position of rough equivalence or balance of forces. There were some people in the country who said we had to go back to a superior position. There were other people who said it doesn't matter, let the Russians have more than we, we don't care. But the, I think the very solid consensus was that we ought to maintain this rough balance of forces with the Soviet Union. And that was the basic goal of the MX, was to address that concern.

ASKS ABOUT HIS CONGRESSIONAL APPEARANCE, CONFRONTING SENATOR TOM MCINTYRE AND LARRY SMITH. WHAT WERE THEIR CONCERNS?

The...we... the Air Force had begun to recognize at that point that while the development of the missile was a relatively straightforward engineering task, the development of this security basing mode was a very complex political, economic and engineering. And that it might well take longer to determine the basing mode than to do the missile. So we had talked of the possibility of keeping the missile on schedule, initially putting in silos, because there was not an extant threat against those silos, just a potential threat. And Senator McIntyre and Larry Smith took the view which history I think proved correct, that that threat could materialize quicker than anyone then anticipated. And that we ought to give priority to developing that survivable basing mode. And beginning in 1976 and from that point forward the Congress stipulated that we weren't to spend MX money on non-survivable basing modes.

WAS HE HAPPY THEN?

I wasn't terribly put out about it. It was, I didn't agree with it. I was working with the understanding and advice of our experts on how we build missiles who at that time were projecting that it would be perhaps decades before the Soviets fielded a missile of sufficient accuracy to threaten our silos. That turned out to be quite wrong and within a very few years the Soviets demonstrated that they did indeed have that capability.

ASKS MCINTRYE AND SMITH'S CONCERNS, WAS IT SOLELY SURVIVABILITY, OR ALSO BY THE ACCURATE COUNTERFORCE CAPABILITY OF THE MISSILE.

I think it was a bit of both, but I do believe there was a genuine concern about survivability. And if you take the long-term perspective, a very legitimate concern.

ASKS LARRY SMITH'S ROLE.

I think Larry Smith did a great deal of research, did a lot of the theory that went behind it. He developed a keen understanding of the issues and certainly had the competence and trust of Senator McIntyre.

WAS CONGRESSIONAL STIPULATION A TURNING POINT IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE PROGRAM?

I don't know. I think it was just a shift in emphasis rather than a turning point. Again, the Air Force was not insensitive to this issue, I remember that General LeMay as early as the 1950s had argued against the silo basing, thinking that eventually the Soviets would make that a non-viable mode. In 1966, ten years before the Senate action, there had been a study called STRAT-X which looked at survivable basing modes. So there was some concern as far back as then. I think in the mid-'70s the Air Force saw that threat as a little further off than did the Congress, and history proved Congress correct as a matter of fact.

ASKS ABOUT HIS AWARENESS OF THREAT.

Yes, intelligence data became available in the, in the... '77, '78, time period which made it quite clear that the Soviets had achieved that degree of accuracy and were in the process of deploying a vast number of highly accurate warheads.

WHAT PROVED SO DAUNTING ABOUT THE SEARCH FOR SURVIVABLE BASING MODE, EVEN EARLY?

The, the first problem I think was getting a consensus with a scientific, technical community of which there is a fairly large body in this country. There were a complex set of issues. And in general terms you can look at four categories of survivable basing modes for missiles. One, you can have systems, a basing mode that's impervious to attack. You can imagine that. You can bury missiles a mile under the ground, for instance, or you can put them on the south slopes of mountains where they can't be struck from the north. But there turn out to be fairly significant technical problems with all of those. You can imagine defending the silos with anti-ballistic missile systems. Some fairly conventional and some rather bizarre were proposed. And again those tended not to, not to survive a good technical review, particularly if you imagine that you are going to maintain the ABM treaty. The third category were things that were... where the survivability depended on keeping them in motion. You could move them on railroads, you could move them on highways, could move them on rivers. You could put them to sea. Those that were moved around the country generally were rejected because of problems with public interface. People don't want a missile driving by the village square. Those that went to sea and water tended to lose the characteristics because if you do value the missile in the first place. The final category of survivable basing is a family of systems which basically depend on concealing a relatively small number of missiles in a relatively large number of protective shelters, and that's called MPS, the Multiple Protective Shelter system. And over a period of time, in the '70s, there was a growing consensus that it was in that latter category that the most promise lay. And that's where the efforts were focused. Once you get into that and you, you agree to the basic concept, you can have a fairly small number of missiles, in a large number of these shelters. And then you can get into in interminable engineering debates as to what the shelter looks like, is the missile in it vertically or horizontally? How do you connect them, is it a road, is it a covered trench, is it a rail system? And so forth. But those are really engineering details that require time and work. But are all surmountable in time. Then of course you have the continuing concern about public acceptance of a vast new project such as that and particularly by the people in the immediate area whose lives would be affected by it.

ASKS WHO ORIGINATE THE MULTIPLE AIM POINT IDEA.

It's... I don't know who might have had it first. It's identified in the STRAT-X study and so it was around as early as 1966. We didn't like to call it the multiple aim point because we did not envision that as encouraging missiles to be aimed there. But it's to discouraging missiles to be aimed there because an attacker ought to be able to calculate that he would use more of his force to destroy it than her than he could destroy, and ought to thereby be dissuaded from making the attack.

ASKS HIM TO RECALL STORY.

That's correct and it's sort of a... we tend to lapse into jargon, engineering terms and don't think carefully of the semantics of what it is we're saying. And it was for a period of time called a multiple aim point and that then led people to talk of it as a, as a re-entry vehicle spongs which is an awful way to think about it. And in fact in my mind just the opposite of what we are trying to do. To present such an uninviting target that no rational enemy would attack it to begin with.

BUT IT MADE PEOPLE FEEL LIKE TARGETS.

That's correct.

WITH SURVIVABILITY A PRESSING PROBLEM, WHY WEREN'T ICBMS ABANDONED?

There are several reasons for not choosing to abandon the ICBM. One would be a matter of perception I think, in that the Soviets had embarked on a program which they had spent tens of billions of dollars to pose a threat to our existing ICBMs. Because of this semantic problem with the term multiple aim point and the perception that conveyed to people who might be approximate to the location that they were targets, one of the first steps I took when I moved to the Pentagon and became directly responsible for the MX activity was to change it to, I think, a more correct title, the Multiple Protective Shelter. Which, in my mind at least, more fairly describes what we were trying to build, I might say that I never was...

RESTARTS HIM.

I might add that I never was able to persuade the opponents of the system to use, to use my term.

WHY NOT ABANDON ICBMS?

Well. First I think, if the United States, the leader of the Free World, the only country maintaining a nuclear arsenal to counterbalance that of the Soviets, were to voluntarily abandon its land-based ICBMs in response to the Soviets posing a threat to it, I think that certainly would have been seen as a submissive act, showing a lack of resolution on our part. So I think there was a perception problem and that alone might not have been enough to retain them. But ICBMs also have a set of characteristics that cause them to be muchly valued, not the least of which is that they are much, much, less expensive than the alternatives, the bombers and submarines. Perhaps a third the cost. So if you look forward to a long-term strategic competition, I think you are reluctant to abandon to the other side the inexpensive way while you go do the expensive things. Additionally the ICBM had unique war fighting characteristics. They are, they get to targets very quickly, hit it with great accuracy. Probably more importantly though is that they are not subject to the same threats as the submarines might be or as the bombers might be. And that requires the Soviets then to expend, as they do, vast sums of money trying to cope with all three legs. And to the extent that you did away with one leg or perhaps two legs,[ they can spend more and more money to cope with the remainder.]

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

That's not... that's a fair question... It certainly could have gone the other way. There was, after the Air Force became a separate service there was a meeting in Key West, Florida, which was presided over by President, then President Harry Truman. And so the role and missions were carved out and the Air Force wound up with that one. It could have gone to the Army, it could have been viewed as an extension I guess of the coastal defense mission which the Army had had. The Array did come out of that with the ballistic missile defense mission and I think common sense would say that those two ought to be combined in one service or the other. But I'm not sure that the Air Force got the advantage by getting that. It's a very onerous job. And one that causes the Air Force a great deal of difficulty and costs a lot of money.

ASKS ABOUT PROBLEMS IT POSES FOR AIR FORCE.

Yeah. It's... that's quite true, And one of the funniest statements that I heard, and I heard it more than once during this great debate on how we're going to base it, was that because the Air Force kept rejecting proposals for air mobile missile systems, that the Air Force was hopelessly prejudiced against air planes. And to me that was ludicrous because clearly if it were a close call and the data would support it, the Air Force would be much happier with these things in airplanes which we enjoy working with, which are good for our people to work with, than having them in some electronic gopher hole in the desert which is a very difficult thing to recruit, train, motivate people to do that. And it's... I have a tremendous admiration for the people who man the existing intercontinental ballistic missiles. It's hard tedious work, not very romantic. They don't get to see the fruits of their labor other than that they come up to see that peace still reigns. Which must be a good feeling for them. It's an altogether different thing than actually working on airplanes, flying airplanes and seeing them fly. So the Air Force as an institution, I always argued, would be much better off if the MX missile had gone away and disappeared. I think the country as an institution would be much worse off.

IS THE FACT THAT FEWER PEOPLE ARE NECESSARY FOR MULTIPLE WARHEADS A REASON TO PROMOTE THEIR DEVELOPMENT?

Yes. The basic argument for having a multiple warhead system is purely economics. And a large quotient of that economic argument is the manpower that's required to maintain and operate it.

ASKS OTHER PROBLEMS FOR AIR FORCE.

It's a job I think the Air Force does very well. It does require constant recruiting, training of people because you obviously can't bring in a person and put him in a Minuteman control silo and expect him to stay there for a 20-year career. So those people are constantly rotating through there at a faster pace than with the airplane people.

ASKS ABOUT OTHER BASING IDEAS.

Well I think you hit on a key point because later in another Republican era, after Reagan came into office, there was a widespread view that the MX in a multiple protective basing system was an invention of a Democratic Administration and you're quite correct when Ford in 1976 as part of his proposed 1978 budget. And it asked for development, full-scale development of the large missile, the ten warheaded missile, and of a survivable basing mode expressing a preference for the trench system but also suggesting that we would look at, at discrete shelters as well.

WHY WAS TRENCH IDEA REJECTED?

Well it was not a, necessarily a bad idea. We actually built a 14,000 foot trench in Arizona and we demonstrated some innovative construction techniques, slip forming. Further study, I think, showed two things. One that there were some very arcane threat situations, I imagine that would propagation of nuclear effects down the trench raise some questions that are difficult to answer. But also I think it became clear in this period that it would be less expensive to build the discrete shelter system.

RECALLS IDEA TO BUILD SMALL CHEAP HOLES WHICH BECAME IDEA OF FEWER MORE EXPENSIVE HOLES.

Well those are the two separate changes here that occurred at different points in time and for different reasons. First the... Mike May's group did I think a magnificent job in their review, did envision a very large number of quite inexpensive vertical shelters. Further study of that suggested that, that the shelters were not as inexpensive as they thought and that had to be offset then by the cost of all the road construction to link all that together. And again there was no bias as we approached that argument. It's just a question of the economics of it. And ultimately we came to the conclusion that about 23 shelters per missile, spaced about a mile apart, was the right, right compromise between the countering arguments.

HOW DID THEY DECIDE ON 23?

The number 23 was not magical. It was just the product of a series of calculations and various analytic studies. And it came, it was about 23. And 23 is the number we settled on. It could have more or less without any, any particular effect. But it would not have been twice as many or ten times as many. According to the data with which we were working, that was about the right number.

ASKS RATIONALE BEHIND PROLIFERATING SHELTERS FOR A MISSILE.

Well...basically, prol... proliferated shelters... basically that shelter system to my way of thinking was simply a means of de-MIRVing the Soviet ICBMs. I think that the greatest mistake that was made in the development of nuclear weaponry was to go rather blithely into these MIRVed systems, which are quite destabilizing. And undesirable. By putting one MX missile and hiding it amongst 23 shelters, the Soviets would now have to plan on attacking it with not one warhead, but with 23 warheads. And if they wanted a high confidence they would probably want to attack each shelter with two warheads. So they would be firing 46 warheads with the expectation of killing ten of our warheads. So, 46-to-1, adverse exchange ratio. And if a rational enemy can make that kind of calculation and if the starting balance is anywhere near equal, then that's the last thing he wanted to attack. And you have achieved deterrence and that's what it was all about.

WHY IS MIRVING A BAD IDEA?

Because the MIRVed ICBMS, silo based, are at once enormously threatening and enormously vulnerable. If you can imagine both sides sitting with ICBMs, each of which has ten warheads on it, at a time of crisis both have to be concerned that the other side doesn't go first and thereby destroy ten of their warheads with one of his own. This tends in a crisis situation to have the leadership get their fingers quite close to the trigger and that's just inherently undesirable and destabilizing and a condition that we all ought to wish didn't exist.

ASKS FOR TWO SCORPION ANALOGY.

Well that was... That goes back to Professor Oppenheimer who's one of the fathers of the idea of the original atomic bomb. And he posed that analogy of two scorpions in a bottle. Both of whom know that the one who strikes last dies. So they have a tendency to... be very much in an attack mode.

ASKS HIM TO REPEAT STORY.

Well the analogy has been made of two scorpions in a bottle, each of which knows if he attacks the other first he could kill him, and each of which knows that if he doesn't attack first he could be killed. So there's a strong... a very strong tendency on the part of both of them to begin that attack. And you have the destabilized situation in that bottle, just as we have with the MIRVed missiles in the silos.

WHAT DOES THAT SAY ABOUT HIDING MISSILES?

Well to the extent that each missile and each missile warhead would require the use of multiple attacking warheads, you have, you have accomplished your goal of effectively de-MIRVing your opponent.

ASKS ABOUT DESIGN CHANGES TO HIS PLAN THAT WERE PUT IN DURING CARTER ADMINISTRATION.

The... initially President Carter came to the White House strongly opposed to the MX and to the whole notion of any increase in nuclear forces. To his credit he studied those issues very assiduously through his Administration and his viewpoint changed. And by the spring of 1979 I think he had reached the conclusion that he needed to move forward with the ICBM modernization program. As part and parcel of his SALT plans. He was anticipating signing a SALT II agreement in Geneva in June of '79 and I think he felt, and certainly a lot of people encouraged him to believe, that he needed to couple that with a decision on the MX missile. So in, as I recall, early June 1979, he announced the decision. And this was after exhaustive study personally on his part, he really knew the subject at this point, he announced a decision to proceed with the large MX missile. There had been earlier talk of a smaller missile and a common missile with the Navy. And he had rejected that. That was to be based in this Multiple Protective Shelter system to be more precisely defined later but specifically land-based, not, he was rejecting all of the sea-based alternatives. And he made that announcement some, a week or few days before he went to Geneva to sign the SALT II. After he came back from.... later in the summer of '79 there were a series of meetings, discussions and so forth. And from that came a White House decision to do two things. One, had to do with whether the missile was sheltered in a vertical or a horizontal mode. The reason one would prefer the vertical mode is it is much easier to harden and hence less expensive. It's a cheaper solution. The reason one would not prefer the vertical mode is that a missile that's stored vertically inherently takes a long time to extract from that shelter and move. It's a matter of many, many hours if not days to do that process and no one could imagine a way you could quickly do that. President Carter, I think, not unreasonably, argued that while the, the vertical shelter system provided survivability through successful concealment, there was, it was not, and that no one could imagine a way to pierce that concealment, but still he said, looking decades ahead, there might come a time that somehow that concealment would be compromised. In which case that you had inherently immobile systems, or very slow to move systems and no, no means of survivability. So he opted for a horizontal system, which is inherently quick to move. It can move in a matter of a very few minutes, as a second means of survivability. That added some increment to the cost but it was not extraordinary. It was a few percentage points more expensive to do it that way than the other. And again I think not unreasonable for the President of the United States to say I'm willing to pay that extra expense to ensure that my successor 20 years from now doesn't have that concern. So he, he made that decision, that fundamental decision, with which I had no argument at all. Then they moved into the area of verifiability as part of the arms control process. It was imperative that there be a system whereby the Russians could verify what we had, just as we wanted to verify what they had. And I think without adequate thought and study some features were added to make this missile more verifiable which led a lot of people to say it was a Rube Goldberg device and indeed had begun to look like a Rube Goldberg device. The decision was made that the missile would be inseparable from its carrier, which then meant you had to have a much larger shelter now to house the whole carriage rather than just the missile, There were features like openable ports on top of the shelters so that would permit some sort of inventory sampling from space. Presumably you could on a given day open up a certain segment of it. And I don't really think any of that required because we all had a perfectly valid scheme for verification which relied on separating the verification process from the concealment process both in time and space. And people tended to overlook that's what we have always done with submarine launched ballistic missiles. And nobody is concerned about, about that. So these features were put in which I thought were undesirable and inappropriate. But they didn't stay very long. We shortly thereafter convened yet another defense science board. A review, this one chaired by Glen Cannon. And in short order they went through it and were quite satisfied with the horizontal aspect of it and did away with some of these unneeded verification features which added greatly to complexity and cost.

ASKS WHY HE WENT ALONG WITH CARTER'S REVISIONS TO HIS DESIGN.

Well... the White House does not make recommendations to the Air Force. Generally they give us instructions and guidance. And basically what we were getting from the White House was, "Here's our package and if it's okay with you we'll proceed on it." We had a choice at that point. We could have sort of dug our feet in the ground and said, "No, this is unacceptable. These features just won't do. And we can't in good conscience recommend it." We could have done that. We opted instead to say, "OK. We agree. We'll support this package. And then we'll get to work to clean up some of these untidy features that had been added." And that's what we did. From a practical point of view that seemed to have been not too bad of an approach. Each ICBM, one, one solid piece of which is the first stage. That weights 110,000 pounds. That can't be carried on a Safeway truck, it can't be carried on a helicopter. There is only one way you get it into its deployment area and that would be on a rail line that would bring it in. And that's...nobody can allege that there is some way you can sneak that thing in. There is only one entry point and that, you presumably would put them in on a preannounced schedule in a way that they could be verified.

ASKS HIM TO REPEAT FROM BEGINNING.

So by, I think November of 1979, we had a basing mode and a missile with which most people were quite content. There were some who still held out that it should be vertical rather than horizontal but I think most people had accepted that notion and the undesirable, unnecessary features had been added for verification purposes had all been taken, been taken out. So from a practical point of view I think our decision to accept what we thought was a somewhat flawed version and clean it up later worked quite well. But from a political and a perceptual point of view it turned out not to be a good thing at all. Because by then in the literature, in the minds of people, it had become enshrined, this Rube Goldberg vision, and in particularly the more conservative Republican element began to characterize that as a missile, a Democratic missile. Wilber Kiney once called it the "Democratic Missile" and the harsher termed it a missile, a basing system that had been designed by Brezhnev at Geneva. So. It was quite a shock to us, having been basically dealing with an opposition of a more liberal persuasion, now to find that these rock-ribbed conservatives were strongly opposed to what they viewed as a Democratic basing system.

ASKS HIM TO REPEAT PART OF STORY.

So by, around November of 1979 we had a missile basing design that was, I think, generally satisfactory to the proponents or people who were more seriously studying the issues. And it could be argued from a practical point of view that we had made the right decision in accepting what we viewed as a somewhat flawed White House design and then in a few months cleaning that up to a design that was quite acceptable. But from a political and a perceptual point of view that turned out to be quite harmful to follow that path, because in those intervening few months, in the media television, presentations of this, what was characterized as a Rube Goldberg system, that image became embedded in the minds of a lot of people. And we were quite shocked to find ourselves now under attack by very conservative people around the country, who convinced themselves that this missile basing design had been seriously compromised either by the feckless Democrats in the kinder case or as a sop to Brezhnev in Geneva in the harsher case. And we had spent most of our time in the past sort of fending off attack from more liberal elements around the country. We now found ourselves under very serious attack from a very conservative elements in the country. So we paid a price for that.

WAS BILL VAN CLEAVE ONE OF THE CRITICS?

Yes he was.

WHAT DID HE SAY?

Bill I think... Bill Van Cleave was basically attacking a system that was not proposed and it's somewhat hard to enter a meaningful argument on that, on that basis. He still had the image of the underground railroads and a lot of features that were removed. And in time, in due course, Bill studied and understood what the current proposal was, the baseline that we were working with, and came to support it, I understand.

ASKS DAMAGE FROM CONSERVATIVE CRITICS.

It didn't really hurt us in Congress, Congress, the cognizant committees of Congress, understood the system very well and they followed it. They, they understood what had transpired. And they understood how the system had been refined to an acceptable... We didn't have any real difficulties with Congress on this issue. What...the really harmful aspect of it was in the conservative element of the Republic party a climate was now created where it was easy to be very critical of this. That then got coupled with the fact that Republican senators from the states in question, Utah and Nevada, with close contacts to candidate Reagan, President-elect Reagan, were able to voice their concerns from political and environmental points of view and an image had been created that it's a Rube, a Rube Goldberg device anyway. So I think that made it easy for... for candidate Reagan to say some uh, unfriendly things about the system and I think it made it easy for him to ultimately make the decision not to go in that direction.

CITES TURNER'S CRITICISM THAT SOVIETS COULD JUST KNOCK IT ALL OUT.

I think probably the most vocal and consistent opponent of the MPS basing mode and the MX missile in the Carter Administration was Director Turner. He has a background that might not lead him to be unduly biased in favor of land-based ICBMs. And I think he tends towards, more towards the mutually assured destruction theory of deterrence than I do and that most of us do. But for whatever reasons it was clear that Admiral Turner never supported the system, even after President Carter had endorsed it.

WERE HIS OBJECTIVES WITHOUT VALIDITY?

I don't think that argument is a valid one because the question is not, can they build more things to pose more threats, of course they can. The question is: What does it cost them to do that? And what does it cost you to respond to it? And according to our calculations, we could build the shelters at a somewhat lower cost than they could build the warheads. But if they embarked on that course, at some point in time the ABM treaty would become meaningless because the purpose of the ABM treaty was to avoid a proliferation of warheads. So if the Russians are building thousands and thousands more, then there's no meaning to the ABM treaty. At that point it would have been possible to couple a ballistic missile defense system that would preferentially defend only the shelters in which there was the missile, and you've got enormous leverage for that. If the Russians fired 2,300 warheads at your 23 shelter, you would shoot down only the one that was coming at, at the shelter with the missile, ignore the other 22. So he would then have to come with another 23. So you're getting the 23-to-1 type of leverage. I think it would have been very easy for the Russians to calculate that that was an arms race they would not want to become involved in.

WHY WERE UTAH AND NEVADA PICKED?

There are vast amounts of government land in Utah and Nevada that are not used for a great deal. And geologically it's, it's suitable. It's...you don't want these things necessarily too close to the Soviet Union, you probably wouldn't prefer not to have them in the northern tier of the country. You don't want them too far south because you don't want them to travel too far. So it was done on the basis of a number of studies and a, a variety of factors went into it, and out of that came Utah, Nevada. Not as the only area. We looked at areas in Arizona, and New Mexico, and Texas, that would have been suitable alternatives. But on balance it seemed to be the most logical.

WHY WERE THESE STATES PREFERABLE?

Geography. It's... the others were further south. There was less land available in some cases, in most cases. Tremendous amount of government owned land in both of those states.

CITES MORMON OBJECTIONS.

By the end of 1978 it was becoming clear that Utah-Nevada area would be the favored. So we made our initial visits out there. And I think in December of 1978 met with the officials of the Mormon church, just to explain what we were about, and what the proposition was. Then I met with Governor Matheson of Utah and Governor Bob List of Nevada. Following that meeting at which we were well received and I think warmly welcomed, we found everyone nearly supportive, and following those meetings both governors, List and Matheson sent telegrams to President Carter, indicating support for the deployment of the MX MPS system in their states, indicating they thought it was a national need and that they could handle the environmental problems without undue consequences. Well that was the initial position so we, in somewhat of a fool's paradise, thinking that that wasn't going to be that difficult. In time those positions changed very dramatically and both of them wound up opposing that in response to very extreme political pressures from their constituents.

WHAT HAPPENED IN THAT TIME?

Well there was a considerable organization that was put to opposing the MX missile out there. Which, and it was quite an easy thing to do on an emotional basis. It's, people are understandably concerned with the notion of having nuclear missile as a neighbor. It's not a very appealing idea to anyone. So it wasn't a hard thing...

[INTERRUPTION]

Well clearly the two governors reversed their position over time in response to pressure from their constituents. That was not just a grass roots uprising. There was a tremendous organization that was put together to oppose the, the MX missile, just as there had been a large organization opposed to the B-1 and the Trident submarines. But they found it a lot easier to work with this, this particular issue because people are understandably concerned over the notion of having a nuclear missile as a neighbor. And it's quite easy to play on those fears. Additionally the people out there in those areas, a lot of people went into and Nevada because they liked the open space, they don't like being crowded, and the idea of a vast horde of construction workers was not pleasing to a lot of people. So it was not difficult to arouse concern and generate points of protest. That was done over and over again. We even had a national television debate out there, you might recall, at the time. But it, so we had a very vocal opposition to the deployment of the MX in those states. But I think a lot of people lost sight or were never aware of the fact that, that polls were being conducted regularly out there and up until the time President Reagan rejected the idea of deployment there, typically about 70 percent of the people in both of those states said they would support the deployment of the MX missile in Utah and Nevada, as long as the President said it was the right thing to do. And so the opposition, while very visible and very vocal, was not a majority opposition.

WAS IT PEOPLE FROM THE OUTSIDE?

There was a lot of that. There was a tremendous number who were speakers out there. Every week, there was a new speaker. There are people who enjoy doing that thing and no doubt think they're doing a public service. And most of them came from outside. Additionally there were a little small number of people in the local area who were opposed, some because simply their political views, just sort of a general view that we didn't need any more nuclear weapons anywhere, much less in their... area. And then there were some people whose economic interests might have been threatened, particularly I remember the very violent opposition by the cattlemen in that area who felt that their right to use the federal lands to graze cattle might some, in some way be threatened. Although we never saw that. But they were strong opponents of ours. On the other hand, various groups out there were strongly supportive and encouraged us to continue.

CITES CONCERNS ABOUT SURVEILLANCE.

Well there. A citizen can make any assertion he wishes and certainly Mr. Garland made his share. And there were a lot of extreme statements. I remember reading over and over that, that we would exhaust the nation's supply of cement. And it wouldn't be possible to have any other construction and I took the trouble to calculate precisely how much cement would be required for this project. And it was a lot but what it turned out to be was 50 percent of the anticipated production of one new cement plant that Martin Marietta was opening, and coincidentally in the state of Utah. We would have taken half of the production of that one plant. Over and over again we heard the water issue because will evoke emotion as quick as anything in that arid region. And it was expressed that so many thousand acre-feet of water would be required for the MX system and people would throw up their hands in horror and say we... oh that will drive us out of the region. Again when we checked we found out that the annual requirement for water for the entire MX system deployed in that area was equal to the requirement for the water for the seven golf courses in the city of Las Vegas, Nevada. So we ran into that hyperbole, exaggeration. And it's a lot easier to make charges like that than it is to refute them.

DID HE ATTEND PUBLIC MEETING IN UTAH?

Yes, I went to numerous public meetings.

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I went to a number of public meetings out there. I tried for a period of two or three years to get out to that area once a month or so to meet with the various groups out there, explain what we're doing, let people know what our plans were as opposed to what other folks said our plans were. And try and point out the good aspects along with the bad and try and get people to work together to prepare for this. And so I was out there very often. Got to know a lot of people in those two states and made some very good friends there.

DID HE GO TO DELTA MEETING?

No, I didn't go to a meeting in Delta. I think Guy Hecker went to that meeting.

DOES HE KNOW WHAT HAPPENED THERE? DISCUSSES ANSWER.

Well she was sort of the local leading opponent of the system and there was thought she was going to run for Congress, Senator, Governor, something, on that as a platform. And it was one of the, one of the concerns of the incumbent politicians. That here was an issue that somebody could run them out of office on. So it made it, it made it difficult for them to stand tall at that time.

ASKS HOW HE EXPLAINED PROGRAM IN UTAH.

The... you have to visit that area to appreciate it but we, we sent geologists out doing surveys of the proposed deployment area. And they would stay out in the field a week at a time and more often than not they would come back and say they never saw a human being during the course of that week. This is very unpopulated, unvisited areas. Yes, we would all like a pristine world and we would like to preserve nature in its original environment but that's not possible. For economic reasons it is not possible. For defense reasons.

WERE THERE FEARS OF MANAGING SUCH A HUGE SCALE PROJECT?

Yes. Legitimate ones. I myself was very concerned over the, I was more concerned over the construction aspect than I was the development of the missile aspect. I felt that was pretty straightforward engineering and we had done it a lot. We knew how to do it. But this was going to be quite a complex, very large-scale project. It was going to involve bringing in large numbers of workers in a fairly short time, having them there for a few years and then phasing it down. And that creates very major economic, environmental, social, cultural problems, how you educate the children, and there are a lot of problems. And we expected and had already begun actually furnishing federal money to help deal with that problem. And I'm quite certain that Congress would have been more than willing to fund the local areas to cope with that. Nobody wanted to impose that additional burden on local governments.

ASKS PART OF MORMON OPPOSITION.

I don't know. I'm not privy to the inner workings of that group.

HE WENT TO SEE THE ELDERS?

Yes. And, and I don't want to say they endorsed the idea but certainly we did not come away from that meeting other than encouraged. What the inner workings were after that I don't know. The announcement of their opposition came with no warning to me.

YOU DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT LOBBY VS SYSTEM?

No, that was a very closely held decision until it was made. I... my guess is that there were people inside the church hierarchy that were strongly against it but the opposing view was the one that ultimately prevailed.

ASKS IF THERE WAS A PROBLEM WHEN THEY CHANGED THEIR MINDS AND SAID THEY NEVER ENDORSED IT.

It did. It led to the charge that we were misrepresenting the case. I don't think it was ever... that anyone in the Air Force ever said "we have an unequivocal endorsement of this system from the leadership of the Mormon Church." But it would be more than fair to say that... we met with them before we met with anyone else and we came away encouraged.

AND IT WAS SURPRISING BECAUSE THEY GENERALLY SUPPORT NATIONAL DEFENSE.

Yes they are and it was a rude surprise to us, and a disappointment.

ASKS REACTION IN MAY 1980 WHEN THEY ANNOUNCED.

We viewed it as a disappointment. It's clearly within their prerogative to do take a position such as that. We thought their reasoning was not sharp. And we would have been happy if they hadn't done it, but they had.

DID IT FEEL LIKE THE END?

It did not because again the people were polling out there regularly. And the polls continued to show that a substantial majority of the people would support the system if the President says it's the right thing to do. And interestingly a slightly higher percentage of the Mormons held that favorable view than the general population. So while the hierarchy had made that decision, it was not by any means totally accepted by the general Mormon population.

ASKS EFFECT OF MOYERS DEBATE.

I think it was inconclusive. It allowed a number of people to restate positions they had stated over and over again and were well understood.

ASKS IF IT WAS HARD TO EXPLAIN THE RATIONALE BEHIND THE SYSTEM WHEN THEY THOUGHT THEY WOULD BE TARGETS.

It was not. I, I talked to many groups out there and I may delude myself but I honestly believe that most of the people I talked to accepted and understood the arguments that were made. And on that issue I tried to make a very simple point and that is that the notion of nuclear war is so horrible that it's beyond our imagination to contemplate the damage and destruction of an all-out nuclear war. And it's been said, probably correctly, that in such a war, the living would envy the dead. It's a terrible thing. And as Americans what we need to do is all work together to minimize the possibility of that ever happening, and not being individually jockeying for the high ground or some favored position to be on the day of Armageddon because there's not going to be any favored position. And I think people didn't have any trouble with that notion. I felt like if I could have talked to everybody in those two states rather than 70 percent support we might have had something like 90 percent support.

ASKS IF REAL DAMAGE TO HIS WORK CAME FROM REAGAN CAMPAIGN.

Well that and the fact that certainly the Senator from Nevada, Paul Laxalt, was very close to the President. Senator Garn from Utah was very influential in defense matters. I'm sure the President had a receptive ear to their view. I'm sure that by that time they viewed this whole thing as sort of a political time bomb that could become emotional single issue, litmus test thing for any elected official. And they were happy to see it go away.

SUGGESTS LAXALT AND GARN SUPPORTED IT UNTIL MORMON CHURCH TURNED AGAINST IT.

I think they were perhaps moving away from it. It's difficult to say what the cause and effect was but they, they are both highly sensitive political gentlemen with antennae and had to have been keenly aware of this highly vocal opposition that was taking place in their states. And politicians dread these single-issue groups, understandably, and it looked like this could be that kind of an issue. Didn't matter what you, how you voted on every other issue. If you're wrong on this, I'm going to be against you. And that makes any elected official very apprehensive.

DOES HE THINK THE SENATORS INFLUENCED REAGAN?

I don't know that, but I believe it. I don't know that for a fact but I believe that's the case.

WAS THERE ONE POINT WHEN HE KNEW THE SYSTEM WAS DOOMED?

There was a...yes, there was a precise moment when I was told that the President is going to make the announcement and here's what it contains. But that was not a surprise to me. It was a growing awareness, working with the Townes Panel and just following the way it was presented, that I had concluded at least a couple of months before the announcement that the decision was going to go against us.

WHAT WAS HIS REACTION TO THAT?

Well again I was disappointed. I felt like it was a, it was not an achievement for the country. I think it was a bad thing in that we had a system that had been endorsed by both Republican and Democratic presidents after some fairly rigorous review. That had been broadly supported by Republicans and Democrats in both Houses of Congress over a period of years. Had been studied ad nauseam by all the scientific, technical people involved, and a general strong consensus built to support it. And many, many years and a lot of money invested in it. And to see that done away with, was not a good thing in my opinion.

AND HIS PERSONAL TIME AND WORK?

Well I didn't, I didn't presume that this, that this was my decision and in fact there was a mood of despair and gloom among the people who had been directly working with this. We had an MX project office. And I went up and talked to them the day of the announcement and some of them were literally crying, they were very upset about that. And the point I made to them was that they and we had succeeded in what we were charged to do. That it was not our job to decide ultimately that MX, MPS was the right thing to do. But our job had been to preserve a climate and a condition that would allow the newly elected President to make the decision and execute that decision if he chose to do so. And until the day he said he was not going to he had the political option to put the MX in the MPS system in Utah and Nevada and it could have been done. And we had, we had succeeded in preserving that option for him. He didn't choose to exercise it. He's the President.

ASKS HOW HE HAD TRIED TO EXPLAIN ADVANTAGES OF SYSTEM TO REAGAN.

Yes, I had the opportunity to talk with... Yes, again a uniformed Air Force officer does not have direct access to the President or his closest advisers. I did have access to the Secretary of Defense and had the opportunity to exchange views with him on this subject. I did have the opportunity to work some with the Townes Panel whose views were in due course presented to the President. I spent a lot more time probably with the Congressional leadership, both in the Senate and the House where we had people like Senator Tower and Congressman Bill Dickinson were striving mightily to discourage the President from making the decision he ultimately did make. Recognizing that there would be enormous difficulty in putting together that Congressional consensus for any new alternative. So I had certainly had some indirect access but never direct.

WHAT DID HE SAY TO WEINBERGER?

I first tried to address his concern that we could never do this because we would be tied up forever in a litigation process. And I was in an awkward position because he is a lawyer and I'm not. But I had consulted with a number of distinguished lawyers who worked extensively in this area, knew that body of law. And the, their view was that we would be sued interminably. We expected that we would stay in court. But that under the circumstances and considering the, our compliance with all of the laws, regulations and so forth which we had done very assiduously that it was unlikely in the extreme that any judge would grant an injunction to stop us from work. That we could expect to spend a lot of time and money in court but this thing could succeed, would not be barred from succeeding by any legal action. But Secretary Weinberger was of the opinion that it would. And whether he had researched the issue or that was just an instinctive view of his, I don't know. We spent a lot of time on that subject and a little bit talking about the technical aspects of it.

WAS WEINBERGER PREJUDICED AGAINST THAT BASING MODE BECAUSE IT CAME FROM THE CARTER ADMINISTRATOIN?

I think he might have had a little bit of that but I think probably he... he believed that his boss had already made up his mind.

WAS HE RECEPTIVE TO AIR FORCE COMING IN TO EXPLAIN IT?

There's no more genteel member of government than Cap Weinberger and he was always polite, receptive to any views that we, we cared to propose. But it was sort of wrong to conclude from that gentility that he was agreeing with what you were saying.

HE IS SAID TO HAVE REFUSED TO LISTEN TO WHAT OTHER GENERALS HAD TO SAY.

I think the, the issue had been decided at that point in time and... further discussion was not of any use.

WHO HAD DECIDED WHAT?

I think by that time the President had reached a decision in his own mind and that probably Secretary Weinberger knew what that decision was. I think that happened some time before the, the announcement which I believe was October the 2nd.

Well Bill Van Cleave had been active in the campaign of candidate Reagan as a National Security Adviser and had helped formulate and frame issues relating to national security, defense issues. And had reached an early conclusion that this basing system was flawed. Had been flawed by President Carter in his attempts to, in his, Van Cleave's view, overly zealous attempts to meet the arms control verification questions and presumably not to offend Brezhnev at the SALT talks. Over time as Van Cleave studied this and comprehended the actual baseline system that was being proposed as contrasted to the one that was being proposed, he ultimately concluded, I believe, that it was the right thing to do and became a supporter of it. But unfortunately between those two events he went from a very powerful advisory position to being on the out of the Administration. And while his first view had I think had considerable impact on the process, his latter view was never really put on the table.

ASKS ABOUT TOWNES PANEL.

Yes. I talked to the Townes Panel on several occasions and I made presentations, explained the features of the system and in general answered their questions.

DID THEIR CONCLUSIONS SUPPORT YOU?

Yes, the, the Townes Panel conclusions were several and one of which was there was no one universal enduring solution. That there, it's a complex problem and requires a number of complex responses. They didn't believe that the MPS system in total... They didn't believe that the MPS system was the total answer but they did recommend, and the language was a significant majority of the membership of the Towne Panel, recommend that we build an initial starting set of the MPS system. They also recommended that we continue to explore other basing alternatives and with particular emphasis on a new form of an air-mobile system which had as its unique feature long, extremely long endurance. And I think they also had some recommendations about improving the communications links. And in fact the Air Force agreed with all of the written recommendations of the Townes Panel.

WHAT WAS REAGAN'S REAL MISTAKE?

Well I would imagine they would argue that they didn't make a mistake, that they made the right decision. I think if a mistake was made, they failed to make the rigorous study of the very complex issues that were involved here. It's ironic that President Carter who came to office with all his instincts and intuition in opposition to the deployment of an MX MPS was, I would say, somewhat compelled by circumstances to do that type of study and literally spent months personally involving himself in these issues, until he quite well understood them, and ultimately reached the decision to proceed with it. Although, again, it must have gone against every instinct he had, I don't think we ever got that type of review in the Reagan Administration. I think they came in with a preconceived set of notions about its political impalpability, the legal problems and just thought that they would do away with it. And then find a better solution. And that's the problem with the basing of the land-based ICBM is that it is a problem for which there is no attractive solution. You kind of have to go through it and say, "Here are the alternatives, now which one is the least ugly? And that's MPS and that's the one we go with." But until you go through that process there's always the hope, the belief that if you're a little smarter and look a little harder, you're going to find something that is attractive. So far nobody has been able to do that.

ASKS IF REAGAN ADMINISTRATION THOUGHT IT COULD FIND SOMETHING LESS UGLY.

Yes. I think that was just a belief. I don't think they looked at it in the depth that would support that and they really didn't have a crisp alternative when they made the announcement.

NOTES IRONY THAT REAGAN CUT BACK ON PROGRAM. DOES HE THINK THEY REGRETTED IT?

I think that given the enormous responsibilities of a President or a Secretary of Defense, coming in every day with a new desk full of problems, they would rarely look back on a decision like that. I don't think you can. I think you got to make it right or wrong and move forward.

ASKS HIS REACTION TO OCT 2, 1981 ANNOUNCEMENTS THAT THEY'D PUT THEM IN SILOS.

I'm not very keen on the notion of MX in silos as an end to itself. I can accept the notion of some limited number in silos but certainly not vast numbers. But I find that attractive only if that's an interim position to get to a more desirable position. I was sensitive to the fact that we still had very strong support in both houses of Congress, in both parties in Congress, for ultimately moving into the MPS system. And indeed Congressional language after the Reagan announcement required further study and investigation of that. So I thought, if we keep the production line going, do this deployment, in the fullness of time we may reach another decision. And that may yet happen.

SO HE IS UNCOMFORTABLE WITH THE IDEA OF THE MISSILES IN SILOS FOR TOO LONG?

I would be much happier to have them in a secure mode and I certainly would not want a large number of them in silos.

IS THERE A CONFLICT BETWEEN THE TWO PURPOSES OF A MISSILE? TO BE COST EFFECTIVE IN CARRYING A LOT OF HIGHLY ACCURATE WARHEADS — AND FINDING A WAY TO BASE THIS VERY HEAVY MISSILE AND MAKE IT MOBILE?

They really are separable issues, I think and the first half of that, the building of a cost effective, powerful missile was not too difficult a job and that's been done. As a country we still are wrestling with the issue of what's the right way to base it and I suspect will be for some time.

MIGHT WE HAVE BEEN BETTER OFF MODERNIZING MINUTEMAN III?

I don't think the smaller missiles would have made it any easier to do an MPS-type system. I think the smaller missiles would make it more difficult because A, you need more space for more missiles, and B, you get into a real problem of the verifiability of your system as you get smaller. So I think if you are going into a survivable basing mode and if that survivable basing mode is a multiple protective shelter system, you definitely have a preference for a bigger missile.

CONGRESS WAS MORE INTERESTED IN SURVIVABILITY AND NOT IN COUNTERFORCE POTENTIAL — BUT AIR FORCE SEES THE OPPOSITE IMPORTANCE. ASKS HIM TO DISCUSS.

Well there are 535 members of Congress and 535 individual views on this issue. I think there was a consensus in Congress, a working majority, probably a 3/4ths working majority, that survivability of the missile ought to be a primary object. I think there was about as strong a majority, and not necessarily the same people, that it ought to be a powerful, large, powerful missile, specifically that it should be as large as the Soviet SS-19 which under SALT I was the largest missile we could build. Their argument being that we sign a treaty that give us this limit on what we can do and then if we don't even build to that level we're not providing incentives for the next round of arms control. So there was a strong support in the Congress for that big powerful, capable missile as well. And there was never any real difficulty in getting the votes. There were amendments offered every year to do away with the MX or put limits on it. And they were typically defeated two to one.

WHAT DETERMINED ITS SIZE?

There were two approaches. One was done from an engineering, purely engineering approach in which these unending series of tradeoff studies, length versus or weight versus this, and that came out showing that around that size was about the optimum from an engineering design point of view and a cost point of view. And then overlaying that was this SALT I provision, the limit equal to the size of the SS-19. And coincidentally, those two approaches yielded almost the same number. Out of that came the 192,000 pound missile, the 92 inches which put it in an existing silo. But like any airplane or missile design it's a series of thousands and thousands of compromises.

ASKS ABOUT FIRMAGE AND FARLEY.

Yes, I... remember meeting Frances Farley on one occasion.

ASKS ABOUT MEETING HER.

She was with a group who came to SAC headquarters Omaha. Although I was then assigned to the Pentagon I was asked to go out and make a presentation to that group and I did. And I don't think she found it very convincing but I believe most of the others did.

DISCUSS QUESTIONS REMAINING. REPEATS QUESTION ABOUT MPS BASING DEMANDS ON WATER SUPPLY IN UTAH.

Yes. One of the favorite issues that the opposition used was the water issue because I'm not surprised, I mean that arid region water equates to life and prosperity. And they would cite that to build and operate the MX system in their area would require so many thousand acre-feet of water. A term that I was not used to dealing with. So I had it explored and I found out that this frightening sounding amount of water was almost exactly equal to the amount of water that was required annually to operate the seven golf courses in Las Vegas. So it was not an overwhelming proposition but it frightened people. Interestingly, the other thing we found is that there is no shortage of water in Nevada and Utah. There's a great shortage of inexpensive easy to reach water. But we would have been prepared to drill the thousand-foot wells or whatever was necessary. And we discovered as part of that process that there are very substantial amounts of deep underground water in that region and someday I expect it will get used.

ASKS HIS CONCLUSIONS ABOUT TRYING TO BASE A MISSILE IN THE HEARTLAND.

Well I just think it, I think it reinforces de Tocqueville's very astute observation he made somewhere around 1820 that this would be one of the great, great problems in a democratic America, and that is balancing the needs for defense against the views of ordinary peace-loving people. And certainly it became a very serious problem in this case. And yes, and that's, of course politicians are paid to make political decisions.

SUGGESTS IT IS FRUSTRATING FOR HIM.

Well as Churchill was found of saying, democracy is the worst possible form of government except all others, and I guess we need to be prepared to put up with those problems to enjoy its blessings.