ASKS HIM TO GO BACK TO FIRST ATTEMPTS TO REPLACE MINUTEMAN III. WHAT REQUIREMENTS WERE TAKEN INTO ACCOUNT IN DESIGN?

Well, my first involvement was when I came back to the missile business in 1975. And at that time we were already into the START, the SALT I Agreement, which had, as you may recall, the principle that we counted missiles. Frankly I think the current discussions are a whole lot more fruitful in that they are counting warheads rather than missiles. But nonetheless, in the early, late '60s, early '70s, under the arms control discussions, the agreements were all related to counting missiles and those were in place. And when I got back to the missile business from having worked other places and had access to the intelligence data that was available, it was clear to me the Soviets were building missiles which had the capabilities of large numbers of warheads. And we had not, of course, at that time done anything in terms of updating our ICBM capability since Minuteman III which was really designed and developed in the late '60s, and fielded in 1970. So we were in a situation where the Soviets were outstripping us in terms of offensive capability. At the same time, we fully realized that the real interest of the people of this country was to enhance overall security rather than simply be better at destroying targets than the other side. And so we thought a lot about the initial MX program and just looking at the constraints of the problem, we knew it had to be an excellent missile from an offensive standpoint, because what we were looking at was the SS-19 and the SS-18, both of which were very capable missiles with large number of warheads per missile, and frankly putting the Soviets ahead in the land-based ICBM force in an offensive sense. They also had done some very interesting things relative to making their basing, their silos at the time, much harder than what they had been and what ours were. And so we knew also that our missile had to be very accurate. It had to be able to hold at risk these targets. If it had any real deterrent value. And finally we were looking for survivable basing because as I say we were interested in a system, which would add to the overall stability rather than be destabilizing influence on the strategic equation. So those were the things we were looking at overall. Strong offensive capability, accuracy, and survivable basing so that it might be more stabilizing.

HOW MUCH MORE CAPABILITY WAS GUIDANCE SYSTEMS FOR MX UNDER DEVELOPMENT THAN THE MINUTEMAN III?

Well we were always Interested in the best possible accuracy we could achieve. After all, the whole weapons system is designed to take at risk the hardest targets. And I would say we were after every bit of accuracy we could get. At the time, John Hepher, General John Hepher was the ballistic missile office commander. At that time we were part of SAM. So a different title. But that role. And he had nursed along in the technology this advanced inertial reference sphere which is this floated ball which ended up being, let's call it today the AIRS system. But it was the one that gave promise of significant improvement over the Minuteman III gimbaled system. And so we pursued that technology pretty hard. In fact we flew it on Minuteman shots as a ride along guidance system, at least one, maybe there were two, but at least we flew as a long Minuteman flight just to get the flight experience with it. Precisely how to quantify what we were after, we were after everything we could get. It's significantly more effective than the Minuteman III and I guess I can't in an unclassified sense quantify that any better.

DID HE TESTIFY TO CONGRESS ON THIS?

I answered questions at some Congressional meetings on several occasions. We hosted members of Congress on a regular basis when I was the ballistic office commander, including, you know, Congressman Mavroules, Congressman Les Aspin, some of the Republican Congressman. And many of the staffers. And direct testimony only really appeared once in the halls of Congress and that was since I had left the ballistic missile office, I went up there one time to answer questions relative to the AIRS guidance system and the difficulties at Northrup with the production of that system.

ASKS ABOUT BACK IN 1974, FOREIGN RELATION COMMITTEE UNDER LARRY SMITH AND SENATOR MACINTRYRE...

Yeah, Larry Smith came out and talked to us in great detail. In fact I was very impressed with Larry Smith because he was the kind of a guy who questioned every point with a great completeness I would say. And wrote everything down too, that was kind of interesting. Some, some of the staffers don't... pay all that much attention to what you tell them. But Larry Smith would spend the whole day, go through all the arguments, write most of the main points down and then review it with us for accuracy with us at the end of the day. So he was a very complete and thorough staffer for the Congress. It's true that I think it was Senator MacIntyre, was against accuracy. He claimed that if we made it too accurate it would be provocative and so on. But frankly I could never quite understand that point of view, because it seemed to me that we were all interested in deterrence and that means from the word, the French words, from fear, "deterre" which, if in fact they did not believe the weapon was a powerful, capable one, it has precious little capability to sway them from important actions. And in fact their hard targets were being made even harder which means that in order to have any...impression on the other side, which you must have for a deterrent role, it has to be accurate. So I never quite understood that point of view. Almost like you ought to build a missile and have it inaccurate. That never made any sense to me.

THEN THERE WAS A REQUIREMENT FOR DEVELOPMENT OF BASING MODE THAT WOULD BE SURVIVABLE. WHAT BASING MODES DID HE LOOK AT?

Well the basing mode question for the then-MX, was probably the most publicized event of those years for us in the business. We started out with a rather straightforward examination of how could you base this large missile with several warheads such that it was survivable. For the most part those studies ended up suggesting that the missile should have some kind of mobility. That is, to proliferate the points from which the missile might be launched, might be launched, and therefore make the targeting of that system very difficult. We studied many of those and it boiled down pretty rapidly in our minds to two land-based options, one was what we used to call the trench. It was really a buried tunnel. Trench sounds like it's an open trench. But this thing was a concrete tunnel below ground, fully enclosed tunnel. The idea there was the missile, you could have one missile per tunnel and it could move up and down this tunnel, be parked at a certain location and on command stop and burst out through the relatively shallow ground cover and launched. And the other was the hard, hardened shelter kind of system. That is, where we build shelters and the missile would be moved around and the other...the other side would not know which one had the, had the missile at the time. And you'd move it in a way that you'd conceal that information from them. Those were the two...basic mobile options. And the other one was …of course, we could always harden the silos more. But we felt like there was a finite end to that in terms of hidden, at the other side also becoming very accurate. And at some point additional hardness would be, tail off in terms of its effectiveness. And then the final option that we had and put a lot of interest in was displacing the missile among a proliferated silo system. In other words, don't build the silos quite as hard, but proliferate them, again deny him the knowledge of which one enclosed the missile and therefore achieve a difficult targeting position for him. Early on we kind of zeroed in on the shallow tunnel, buried tunnel. Went through a cycle with that. There were claims that it would not be as survivable as we thought because if it were under attack and a weapon were to go off in the tunnel, so to speak, it would clear large areas of the tunnel. That is the effects would be focused down the tunnel and therefore you really wouldn't survive the missile. It turned out that, that and plus there were some people who were concerned about the costs of building this. A lot of stories have been proliferated about expensive tunnels for, for subway systems and whatever. But we weren't thinking of building this thing in an urban area. It was out in an open territory where one could not have, would not have very many interfering structures, whatever. Anyway, those two ideas, the costs and the effectiveness of the tunnel were brought into question really in the Carter Administration and by the time we had that reviewed and actually did some tests to show that these down tunnel effects were really not all that exaggerated, we had already abandoned that concept and gone to the hardened shelter. Again, then focusing between hard points, whether they were a hardened shelter as a silo version, or as a surface hardened garage type structure. So now we were at hardened shelter, either horizontal or vertical orientation. And that really was the system that we pursued for some time. There are all kinds of stories about the fact that we had 34 or 36 options and all that. Most of that is cosmetic baloney, really. We did look at a lot of options but we never really carried forward to the Air Force or across to the office of the Secretary of Defense, or to the Congress on this large number of options. We more or less sorted those out internally by just stacking up the merits and demerits of the system. A lot of that discussion was kind of turned against us, that is, in an attempt to show that we covered the waterfront, we said, well, we've looked through these 30 options. And then it got to be kind of almost a standard joke, how do you base the MX missile?

GENERAL CASEY, CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT SOME OF THE DIFFERENT BASING MODES THAT YOU STUDIED?

Yes. The MX basing mode was a question that became almost comical in that the idea was that we tried to show that we looked at all different basing modes and as a result it seemed like we had this big missile and we were frantically looking for some place to put it. When in fact none of that was really true. We knew ways and means of basing it. The issue was, how do you pick the best one. Early on our favorite was the so-called buried trench or tunnel. It was a hardened tunnel, below ground, shallow, shallowly buried so that you could run the missile up and down the tunnel and in fact when you got command to launch the tunnel, the missile trailer would just stop where it was, squat down and launch out through the top. It had the advantage of being unobtrusive from the outside surface. The tunnel was buried underground. You could deny knowledge by any outside aggressor as to where the missile was simply because it moved quietly up and down this tunnel. There were several other mobile missile modes talked about and studied and projected. Principally I think it was this tunnel I'm talking about, and then this shelter based system which was a kind of hardened structures on the surface of the ground, connected either by rails or by road, and then a series of silos, not quite as hard as what we talked about later in the super hard silo mode, but rather proliferated so that the location of the missile was denied to any aggressor and therefore survivable in that sense. Early on we thought that the tunnel was the best because it was low in terms of manpower. That is, you could move the missile up and down the tunnel, remotely, electronically, and not have to have people in close proximity to it when you made these moves. Also it had the advantage of not lifting that 200,000 pound structure every time you wanted to move from one point to another. The silo was the one that most of the scientists liked the best because you could make a hardened structure efficiently with this vertical silo mode. Small occlusion on the surface and we were used to building silos anyway. The thing I didn't like much about the silo was as you moved it from one to the other in order to play the game of so-called shell game or concealing the location from any adversary, this SAC cruise would have had to erect the missile and emplace it or emulate that action at the unoccupied silos and that seemed to me like a lot of busy work. And also with the heavy loads and it's somewhat dangerous work to be doing that routinely around the whole array of silos. The surface based system was really I guess the closest alternative to not having to erect the missile and yet being able to move it reasonably efficiently between hard points and still be ready for launch at any time. As I mentioned, we were alleged to have done 30 or 35 different modes. Most of that was cosmetic, as I said. I think the whole story was overblown, partially I guess our own fault. We tried to make the point that we looked at so many and yet it became a tag we were stuck with. "They can't find the right answers," so to speak. But I believe our studies showed the tunnel to be the first best choice, some of the scientists argued that we'd have exaggerated weapons effect should a weapon intercept the tunnel. That plus some people didn't believe our estimates of the cost of building the thing based on their experience with subway systems. But with those two arguments flailing around, we had several expert boards that looked over our shoulder, so to speak. And among those, notable were a couple that the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board did. I think you mentioned earlier Dr. May's study. He led one of the SAB studies, Scientific Advisory Board studies, which I think at that time, let me see if I got the sequence right. First we had the tunnel and these questions were raised. We kind of backed away from that under the influence of a lot of the questioning and said, well, ok, hardened structure on the surface is a reasonable alternative. Dr. May's group, I think, went all the way to the vertical silo and ultimately that was not satisfactory to some people in the Carter Administration. They really wanted the horizontal motion. And so we worked our way back to the shelter base system. The so-called hardened garage connected at that time by roads. And that was a system that really was the forefront of the time when we got full-scale vote and go ahead in 1979. In June of '79 we were told to proceed with the missile, and I think it was September of '79 we finally got the basing mode, full-scale development to start. And that was pursued. It used a lot of area in both Nevada and Utah, the favorite locations. Because we were looking for large areas which could accommodate this array. At that time we were using 200 missiles and 4,600 shelters, or a ratio of 23, 23-to-1 I guess that is. That is 23 potential launch potential launch places, one of those occupied. Therefore the targeting problem was fairly large for any adversary.

But that did use a lot of land and became politically a very hot question and a lot of resistance by some of the people who lived in those states. And ultimately, as you know, in October of 1981, I think it was, after Reagan had taken office and they studied it for a while, his Administration decided they did not want to devote that much in the way of resources and, and land area to this particular basing mode. And cancelled that basing mode. Well, at that time then we had a fairly good start on the missile. We'd started that in '79 and it was coming along very well. The development of the missile was in good shape. But we were then without a basing mode solution. We studied several kind of low-key up to that point, and in fact had several thoughts which we pushed hard on in that year. In fact, around that time, we really got interested in so-called dense pack, or closely spaced basing. The idea was you build reasonably hard structure silos, put them close together, and it would be difficult to target in that any attacking weapons would interfere, one with another. It would take more than one weapon on a silo to kill it because it was hard. And then you'd pack them tight together so that he would have interference of these weapons cause there were two things he had to do. One he had to get more than one weapon on a target, and he had to get them in close proximity to each other because of the inability to get in after the weapons effects have proliferated. Well, we called that the dense pack and I think they called it the dunce pack in Congress and other writers kind of made fun of that idea. Although frankly I think physically it stood up very well. We studied that pretty hard and about a year after the cancellation of the hard shelter based system we proposed that as the way to actually field the missile. It was rather soundly defeated in the Congress, And I think without very adequately -- considering the merits of it— there was a lot of...hype in the press about these people have this big missile they don't know where to put it, and they come up with an idea of the week, which really was not true. But nonetheless, we'll have to wait for history to sort all of that out, I guess. But nonetheless it was true that it was beaten, the idea was beaten down rather soundly in the Congress, and at that time the President said, well ok, he would appoint a special commission to review the whole problem of basing the MX missile. And that was the start of the Scowcroft Commission which included some very distinguished people both from the Republican and Democratic side. And some very experienced people in the ICBM business. Led by Brent Scowcroft. Jim Woolsey was on it, Alexander Haig, Tom Reed, John Deutch from MIT. Some very expert people. I haven't named them all. But they came up with the idea that we should go ahead and build the large missile. Take on this addressing the asymmetry of offensive weapons that we had... had by this time really gotten very severe between ourselves and the Soviet Union. And they also said that they felt that the problem of the survivability of the basing was somewhat overstated in that we still had a certain amount of survivability because the other strategic systems are indeed mobile, the airplanes and the, the sea-launched ballistic missiles. So therefore the synergism of the old triad argument that these systems would still exist if they went after the missiles or if they went after the basing of the airplanes and whatever, you would have the opportunity to launch out with the missiles. Therefore it was a, a difficult thing for any attacker to take on. They resurrected that argument and made it fairly clearly and well in that report. And then they also advocated beginning work on a small mobile ICBM, the so-called "small missile" of today. And so when that report came out, and incidentally they suggested that we go ahead then and base this large MX missile in the current Minuteman silos, for which we had made provisions that it would still in fact fit in the Minuteman silos. And so that solution was discussed with the Congress and the President approved it, Congress approved it and that's the way we finally got basing of the MX and then changed the name to the Peacekeeper. The President did that in June of 1983. And that set the baseline for the deployment of the missile.

WHY WAS IT OK TO PUT IT IN SILOS IN 1983 WHEN FOR YEARS YOU HAD LOOKED FOR ANOTHER BASING MODE?

Well I think it was a question of what are your objectives and how much of them can you achieve? Our objectives from the mid-'70s on were to build a very capable missile and put it on first strategic alert, and to put it in more survivable basing. Putting it into the Minuteman silos answered the first question. We got this excellent new missile with all of its capability and we put it on alert. It did no improve the survivable at all to put it in Minuteman silos. In fact, the assessed hardness of this system is about the same as it would have been with the Minuteman III missile in that same silo. And so we did not achieve all the objectives that we had laid out. The promise of doing so was built into the small ICBM but not yet realized.

WHAT DOES THE DIFFICULTY IN FINDING A BASING MODE SAY ABOUT THE MISSILE? WAS IT JUST TOO BIG?

Well I think that some really and truly felt that way. I never really believed that that was the case. It is true that if you take a missile that weighs 200,000 pounds and you put it on a, a car that you're going to move in a tunnel or something. It's a fairly large structure. But in fact the missile was very capable of carrying ten warheads. So it, it was very efficient in terms of the cost per unit warhead on strategic alert. And always has been. And that was really part of what was driving us to design the missile as large as it was in the first place. The other thing that was driving us was the environment of the original SALT... agreement which was limiting missiles and not warheads. In fact ultimately, in the SALT II discussions a corollary was written to limit the ten warheads per missile. Now the Soviets had this large SS-18 and it was capable of carrying more than that. So it was wise I think that we ultimately got around to that limitation on the number of warheads per missile. But ten is a fairly high level. But we would have been, at least from our view, in very poor position to be building a new missile which was less capable than that level. In fact, as I say, the SS-18 was capable of even more than ten. So as we looked at the Soviets aimed at fielding more than 300 SS-18s, all capable of a very large number of warheads, it seemed to us unwise to not build a missile that was, that was capable, particularly if the international agreements were going to set on counting missiles. Now, your real question though was whether or not the big missile made it impossible to base. I don't think that was it. I think it was possible to drive this thing around in large vehicles. Admittedly they were large and had to be operated in areas where you didn't have interference with public traffic. But areas of the country were available. Perhaps we didn't quite address the problem correctly, I don't know. It is very difficult in our country to get large areas of land dedicated to any purpose, whether it's national defense or drilling for oil or whatever it is. It's just that we're a very sophisticated society, people track everything that happens. And are very, very interested in anything that's in their local area. So I think in, in this democratic society it's difficult to get that kind of dedication of land resources. But I don't think it stemmed so much from the size of the missile or the number of warheads. I think we would have had similar difficulty, even with the small mobile missile, if we were to advocate putting it out into those areas.

ASKS HIM TO DESCRIBE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN VERTICAL AND HORIZONTAL SYSTEMS.

Well I was pointing out that as you try to figure out how you're going to base the large ICBM MX system, in a mode where you deny knowledge of where it's located to an aggressor, it's necessary...

(INTERRUPTIONS).

In describing how you move a large missile from point A to point B, assuming that you're in one of these systems where you're playing the shell game, so to speak, that is you want to move it from one location to another. And you do not want the other guy to know where you put it. Now if you take the, the think piece we had with the shelter base system, 4,600 shelters, 200 missiles, so there are 23 potential parking places for that missile. And you move it from one to another. Now If it's a tunnel underground you can move it down in the tunnel automatically, remotely, without attending crews. That's probably the best in terms of operations and support costs. If it's a horizontal garage connected by roads, then you can drive it from one to the other. Probably with a crew. But you don't have to erect the missile. It simply is in this horizontal position and it's not erected until you actually got a launch message, when it would come out of the hardened garage, erect. And it can be done, that erection can be done with what we call chemical power, gas generator, so it happens within a few seconds. And it's not the kind of operation that has to be attended by all the safety procedures that when you're handling, with hydraulics and men around it. Now then of course if your shelter system is, this vertical shelter is like a proliferated silos. Then every time you go and insert the missile you must erect it and drop it into the, preferably not drop it but gently lower it into the, into the silo. And then if in fact you're going to carry out this game of the other side not knowing which one has the missile then you go and emulate that motion with an equivalent wait at each, at every of the 23. So that that ends up being a lot of busy work for the crews. And in fact it's reasonably dangerous because again you're launching a...like a...80 to 90 foot load. That's a nine-story kind of building that weighs 200,000 pounds, at each and every one of those locations. And that's...I thought always that was a bit of complication that would be good to avoid. So just another thing you figure into when you look at the basing modes.

WAS HE HAPPY WITH NEW FEATURE ADDED TO HORIZONTAL SHELTER SYSTEM TO MAKE IT COMPATIBLE WITH ARMS CONTROL?

No I was not happy with that. I felt like some of those features which we were, I was going to say asked to put in, I should say directed to put in. Such as portals in the top which could be opened for observation to see if the missile was there or not there on demand. That was a complicating thing because it caused us to make the structure larger than it had to be. Spend more money on it than we would otherwise have done. And frankly it did not seem to me to be a very practical idea. After all, who would decide when we'd look, and a lot of questions that were unanswered. I think we laid a lot of those constraints upon ourselves in that era of the Carter Administration with Mr. Turner and the CIA, where we put a lot of these things upon ourselves and it impacted our own systems without our really having any agreement that it meant anything to the Soviets. So I was not happy with those. They added costs. And in fact, I think there was also some exaggeration of the weapons effects which caused us to put the...more money into the individual hard points, spread them further, add it to the area of the system. And that made it more difficult to site because the larger the area the more difficult it was to put it into place. Later in this, in the designs, after we had more time to sort all of this out. In fact, after the Scowcroft Committee decision, report and the decision by the government to site in the Minuteman sites, we went on with super hardened silo studies. And we found that we could build a silo that was much, much harder than we ever thought beforehand, and we proved that with tests, and then combining that with the so-called dense pack or closely spacing, we were able to projects systems which were very, very compact in their demand on land and not terribly expensive. And yet by then the idea of closely spaced basing seemed to have a political aspect that was impossible to overcome. So it was pretty much set aside by members of Congress saying they were not attentive to any more plans which would be closely spaced silos. But my point is that we were able from an engineering and science standpoint, I think to point out, to show that you really could land base with this large missile in such a way that you would have very well enhanced survivability.

ASKS ABOUT STANSFIELD TURNER'S CRITICISMS OF THIS THEORY.

Well Mr. Turner was the Director of the CIA. He had the responsibility for whatever verification might have to be implemented, or at least backing up the verification that was otherwise set in by treaty. So I think he had some legitimate organizational concern about should we play this shell game and the Soviets do something similar? How would he execute his responsibility? Further, I think he was a little biased, he liked the Navy systems and not the Air Force systems, based on his background. So he never made it easy, he always made it difficult for us.

COULD THE SOVIETS OVERWHELM THE SYSTEM BY JUST MAKING MORE WARHEADS?

Well I think that's true, but that's true of any military system that we have ever built. That is, you can project a threat which will cause any system to be overwhelmed. The issue is how far does one go or what investment on our part and the part of the other side is required to achieve stability and deterrence. Frankly, I believe that if you look at today's events, our President's very strong attitude at developing the strategic nuclear systems has led to a situation where the Soviets have finally said now we ought to have some agreements. And I personally think that a very strong factor in that was the current Administration's advocacy of the B-1 and the Peacekeeper missile and the Trident B-5. Now all those systems are expensive and they're all modernization of the strategic forces, and yet when it looks like we are in fact going to do all three and have done all three in a sense, although Trident is not yet deployed, the Soviets came around to agreement. Now some people credit most of that change of heart to either the Strategic Defense Initiative or to Mr. Gorbachev's revised view of the world.

THIS IS OFF OUR SUBJECT.

OK. But my point is that the strategic strength does in fact change the other guy's mind. And therefore I don't believe that if we were to put out 200 MXs in 4,600 shelters, it's automatically true that the other side would then go out and build 8,000 warheads. I mean, I think that's, that's a hyperbole.

HOW WOULD THE SYSTEM HAVE OPERATED IF DETERRENCE HAD FAILED?

Well. ICBM systems are, are very, very capable systems. After all, they are the weapons system that can hit anywhere in the world in 30 minutes with great precision and great destructive power. So they are, they are very good war making systems. I think it's unfortunate that we live in a world where we are under threat of those, and so of course the Soviets view us as holding them at risk. So I think the system will work very well under threat. Depending of course on how much punishment it has taken by the first-strike attack. And that's a question that people argue about interminably. But frankly I believe that the missile systems are the premier weapons system in the inventory on both sides.

HOW WOULD IT WORK OPERATIONALLY?

Well it depends a lot on which of these particular basing modes had been selected and what was the understanding of the national command authority at the time, and when he ordered it to be used.

I'M TALKING ABOUT THE CARTER SYSTEM.

OK. Well let's say we did a very competent survivable basing system and in fact the country was attacked. The idea of that system was that it could in fact ride out the first-strike attack and still have enough residual capability to carry out our war making objectives, our retaliatory objectives. Of course the whole idea was, it's the old conundrum of the deterrence. The idea was to set that in the mind of the aggressor such that he would never start the first-strike attack in the first place. In other words, he always knows you are going to have such tremendous power in the retaliatory attack, that he does not... strike in the first place. That's the whole essence of deterrence and, and in fact it's a paradox because what you do is you say "I want to build the world's most capable military power for the purpose of never using it." And in fact it's the idea of it's very power and resilience in retaliatory capability that you hope does enforce the condition that it never has to be used.

WOULD A SOVIET PLANNER USE THE AMERICANS MIGHT USE THE SYSTEM? THE WE WERE PUTTING THEM AT RISK AS A FIRST STRIKE?

Well I think yes, I think it's only fair to say that anybody who is responsible for making military analyses would look at any means of, of projecting power. But I would say to you this, that the basing itself, the survivable basing, could not be viewed as being very provocative. That is, if the number of missiles were fixed, the most dangerous thing for us to do would be to stand them out here on the street where they're easily attacked. Because they have the same power of delivery as they have in the most protected basing. So all of the money that the U.S. was willing to spend on... if I were a Soviet general, I would view the U.S. investment in survivable basing as perhaps not very provocative. Adding to me, Igor's problem in targeting no doubt. But not necessarily...threatening.

HOW DOES HE FEEL ABOUT CURRENT IDEAS ON MIDGETMAN AND RAIL MOBILE GARRISON SYSTEM? WHICH IS HIGHER PRIORITY?

I can't really comment on that. I think it's currently being... I've read all of the arguments that, you know, the Air Force is opting for the rail mobile over the small missile. If that is in fact the decision, ultimately it will really come from the chief. And I can't really comment on that. I think that as I've said here, there are lots of ways of making missile systems survivable. Every enhancement of survivability is better than the absence thereof. So I could support almost any means of, of making our missile systems more survivable. I would not like to see us to go to less survivable basing for our missiles.

SO WE ARE NOT IN A DANGEROUS POSITION WITH 50 IN SILOS...

No, as a matter of fact, as I said, I think that our fielding the 50 Peacekeepers is probably an important factor in the Soviet's becoming more reasonable in, in INF, and ultimately in strategic arms reduction, START. One thing I would say, and I'd salute very hardily, this current Administration has never counted missiles, they counted warheads. Warheads are what counts. Warheads are what do the job. And to their credit, both in the theater and in the strategic forces, the Reagan Administration has never counted anything except warheads. And that's the right currency.