Defense Panel Urges Reviving of Plan to ‘Hide’ ICBMs

WASHINGTON —  A bipartisan group of congressmen and defense experts urged the Bush Administration Friday to scuttle its predecessor’s proposal to put the MX intercontinental missile on rail cars. As an alternative, it offered a variation of the old “shell game” concept in which the ICBM is hidden among a field of otherwise empty silos.

In the long-running search for an ICBM that would escape a Soviet surprise attack and be politically acceptable, the group set the stage for a new battle over the weapon system by reviving a modification of a plan discarded by the Administration of Jimmy Carter a decade ago.

Variously called a “race track” and “drag strip” approach, the Carter scheme would have shuttled 200 MX missiles among 4,600 shelters in Utah and Nevada to protect them by deception.

‘Snicker Factor’

Resurrecting the idea risks “the snicker factor--an enormous groan” over yet another ICBM basing idea, admited Rep. Les Aspin (D-Wis.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and a member of the group. More than 30 proposals have been rejected to date. But he claimed that the new concept overcomes many of the objections of the earlier schemes.

The group’s report, titled “Deterring Through the Turn of the Century,” sought a basis for compromise between the Democratic-controlled Congress and the new Republican Administration over the ICBM as well as other contentious weapon issues. Balancing recommendations for liberals and conservatives, the report also endorsed:

--Continued funding for Reagan’s controversial Strategic Defense Initiative, commonly called “Star Wars,” at the current level of about $4 billion a year, “with modest annual increases.” It admitted that there is “no near-term prospect” that anti-missile defenses can substitute for today’s deterrence doctrine based on offensive weapons, however.

--Deep cuts in offensive nuclear arsenals as agreed in the Strategic Arms Reduction negotiations. Some conservatives and military officers have begun to challenge the proposed cuts. The United States should drop its proposal to ban mobile ICBMs, the report said. It also suggested that the United States accept a ban on nuclear sea-launched cruise missiles and move to raise the agreed ceiling of 1,600 missiles and bombers.

--Essentially all major strategic weapons programs now in place, while acknowledging that the defense budget will rise no faster than inflation. It said that “some programs may need to be canceled, others delayed,” but it recommended only delays and sought to establish priorities in spending rather than fingering programs for cancellations.

For example, it urged that the ICBM modernization program be modified, and probably at greater cost. It would put only the nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile program in jeopardy. It suggested slowing down development of the B-2 stealth bomber, because it is expensive and unproven, and the Trident submarine program because it might carry too many weapons to fit comfortably into limits of a strategic arms treaty.

‘Sequence Them’

The plan “doesn’t mean you have to cancel programs. You have to sequence them,” Aspin said at a Capitol Hill press conference. Added another member, Robert C. McFarlane, former national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan: “They can have it all, just at a slower rate.”

The group was co-chaired by Harold Brown, former defense secretary in the Carter Administration, and Brent Scowcroft until his appointment last month as President Bush’s national security assistant.

Other members were Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee; two key Republican senators, John W. Warner of Virginia and William S. Cohen of Maine; R. James Woolsey, former undersecretary of the Navy in the Carter Administration; Amos A. Jordan of the Center for Strategic and International Studies here; Aspin, and McFarlane.

Focus of the report was the ICBM issue, which the group said arose because of “the most glaring weakness” in the U.S. strategic arsenal today: the vulnerability of existing silo-based ICBMs to increasingly accurate and numerically superior Soviet warheads. The Soviets might destroy U.S. ICBMs in a surprise attack, then threaten U.S. cities if the United States retaliated.

The danger was first recognized 15 years ago when the 10-warhead MX was designed but the Carter Administration failed to win approval of its MX basing scheme, as did Reagan.

Instead, Reagan appointed a special commission chaired by Scowcroft in 1983 which found that U.S. vulnerability was not as acute as feared because submarine-based missiles and bombers guaranteed sufficient retaliatory forces, even if the ICBMs were destroyed.

The commission also achieved a compromise in which 50 MXs were placed in existing silos (where they are just as vulnerable as the older Minuteman 3 missiles they replaced), in exchange for which the Pentagon began to develop a single-warhead small ICBM, called the Midgetman, that promised to be more survivable than the MX because it could be moved around on dirt roads.

The Bush Administration now faces the vulnerability issue because Soviet submarine-based cruise missiles, among other new weapons, will make possible in the near future an attack on U.S. bomber and ICBM forces at the same time, the group said. This will cause dangerous over-reliance on U.S. missile submarines, in its view.

Recent efforts to resolve the issue have reached an impasse.