MX Missile Research Articles

The Lost Years: The American Peace Movement, From Vietnam to Nuclear Freeze

This article resurrects the lost years of the American peace movement in the wake of the Vietnam War. It follows the efforts of activists to launch a peace conversion campaign as the answer to American militarism, for which the Vietnam War was only a symptom. Through analysis of various archival holdings, this study demonstrates the historical significance of grassroots peace activism over the course of the 1970s—a period largely viewed through the lens of conservative ascendancy. These campaigns successfully pushed back against major weapons systems such as the B‐1 bomber and the MX missile, while further making the question of war and peace central to American politics by the 1980 presidential election.

Sidney David Drell

Sidney David Drell

To Make a Desert and Call It Peace: Stasis and Judgment in the MX Missile Debate

This article demonstrates that the public debate over the MX program alters what we normally perceive as the preconditions for public debate. Instead of establishing the materially relevant facts of the issue at hand in order to provide a point of stasis for formulating competing positions to facilitate argumentative clash, the decision rendered by the Congress responds to justifications from both positions to formulate its policy. The controversy provides insight into the way stasis is established in public debates by challenging the understanding that they are determined in advance. We argue stasis points are established retroactively by the agent of judgment ratifying a point of contact as if this point of stasis had organized the debate all along.

Carter's conversion: the hardening of American defense policy

When presidential candidate Jimmy Carter advocated defense budget cuts, he did so not only to save money but also with the hope of eventual nuclear abolition. Three years later, when President Carter announced his support of full-scale development of the MX missile and modernization of NATO's Long-Range Theater Nuclear Force, it marked a dramatic policy shift for his administration.In light of cost-cutting in the first year of his administration, previous observers have attributed subsequent shift either to the shocks of 1979 - the Soviet Union's move into Afghanistan and the seizure of power by Islamic revolutionaries in Iran - or to domestic political pressure, such as interest group activity, executive-legislative bargaining, or interbureaucratic conflict. Brian Auten now argues that these explanations only partially explain this midterm policy change.In Carter's Conversion, Auten reveals how strategic ideas and studies, allied relations, and arms control negotiations each worked to deflect initial defense stance away from the policy path suggested by the prevailing international military environment. He also shows how the administration's MX and LRTNF decisions subsequently hardened following significant adjustments to these three variables.Utilizing the approach to international relations known as neoclassical realism, Auten demonstrates that Carter reassessed his strategic thinking and revised his policy stance accordingly. Integrating declassified documents, interviews, and private archives with a mountain of secondary sources, he provides a historical analysis of defense policy transformation over the first three years of the Carter administration and a detailed examination of how Carter and his national security team addressed challenges posed by the expansion of Soviet military power.Full of rich history and cogent analysis, Carter's Conversion presents a wealth of detailed arguments about how Carter adjusted his policy outlook, couched in a thorough understanding of weapons, arms control dynamics, and defense policymaking. As a revision of common interpretations, it provides both an example of self-correcting policy change and a realist argument about the end of superpower detente and the start of the Second Cold War.

Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War

Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War. HUGH GUSTERSON. Berkeley: University of California, 1996; 351 pp. Hugh Gusterson's Nuclear rites: A weapons laboratory at the end of the Cold War, an anthropological study of the Lawrence Livermore nuclear weapons design laboratory in California, tells fascinating stories relevant to the sociologies of science and technology, social movements, bureaucracy, adult socialization, and legitimization. Drawing extensively from postmodern and orthodox social theories, Gusterson amply demonstrates the power of anthropological investigation and analysis for the interpretation of North American and European society. Although the secrecy enshrouding weapons research limited Gusterson's access to certain types of information, shortages of data that should have been available and presented render less forceful some dimensions of the analysis. Nuclear rites should provoke great discussion in undergraduate and graduate courses about the ethics and consequences of the science and technology industries. According to Gusterson, accepting the necessity of designing ever more powerful nuclear weapons depends upon believing the theory of ddtente. The greater the destructive power of nuclear weapons and the sturdier the dynamic equilibrium between contending forces, the less likely nuclear weapons would ever be used. Nuclear weapons designers think of themselves as peacemakers, not warmongers, like the MX missile they built. No simple social or psychological factors explain how weapons scientists come to accept the doctrine of ddtente. Weapons scientists do not profess uniform political or religious creeds. Although most weapons scientists are male, many women sustain weapons research through other kinds of work. Learning to accept detente is part of becoming socialized and developing a career as a nuclear weapons designer, processes emergent from actually working on weapons design. Security clearance procedures function as important devices for legitimating detente because they outwardly identify individual scientists' own identities with the laboratory's central mission. As weapons scientists' clearances rise, the scientists move from the periphery to the center of the lab's work in a process mirroring their career development. Participating in the live test of a nuclear device of their own design culminates and redefines the careers of nuclear weapons designers by initiating them into the most exclusive echelon of this elite cult. Gusterson juxtaposes the experiences of nuclear weapons scientists and anti-nuclear activists and explicitly cites dilemmas emergent from his personal participation in both social worlds. In the most compelling parts of this book, Gusterson explains how members of these two, often opposed communities develop commitment by melding body with mind in specific bodily disciplines. …

Nuclear rites: a weapons laboratory at the end of the Cold War

Based on fieldwork at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory - the facility that designed the neutron bomb and the warhead for the MX missile - Nuclear Rites takes the reader deep inside the top-secret culture of a nuclear weapons lab. Exploring the scientists' world of dark humor, ritualized secrecy, and disciplined emotions, anthropologist Hugh Gusterson uncovers the beliefs and values that animate their work. He discovers that many of the scientists are Christians, deeply convinced of the morality of their work, and a number are liberals who opposed the Vietnam War and the Reagan-Bush agenda. Gusterson also examines the anti-nuclear movement, concluding that the scientists and protesters are alike in surprising ways, with both cultures reflecting the hopes and anxieties of an increasingly threatened middle class. In a lively, wide-ranging account, Gusterson analyzes the ethics and politics of laboratory employees, the effects of security regulations on the scientists' private lives, and the role of nuclear tests - beyond the obvious scientific one--as rituals of initiation and transcendence. He shows how the scientists learn to identify in an almost romantic way with the power of the machines they design - machines they do not fear. In the 1980s the 'world behind the fence' was thrown into crisis by massive anti-nuclear protests at the gates of the lab and by the end of the Cold War. Linking the emergence of the anti-nuclear movement to shifting gender roles and the development of postindustrial capitalism, Gusterson concludes that the scientists and protesters are alike in surprising ways, and that both cultures reflect the hopes and anxieties of an increasingly threatened middle class.

Deterrence and the Cold War

The role of nuclear weapons in Soviet-American relations has been hotly debated. Politicians, generals, and most academic strategists believe that America's nuclear arsenal restrained the Soviet Union throughout the cold war. Critics maintain that nuclear weapons were a root cause of superpower conflict and a threat to peace. Controversy also surrounds the number and kinds of weapons necessary to deter, the political implications of the strategic balance, and the role of nuclear deterrence in hastening the collapse of the Soviet imperium. These debates have had a distinctly theological quality. Partisans frequently defended their positions without recourse to relevant evidence. Some advocated strategic doctrines that were consistent with military postures that they supported. War-fighting doctrines were invoked by the air force to justify silo-busting weapons like the MX missile. 1 Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) was espoused by arms controllers to oppose the deployment of particular weapons systems. More careful analysts have been alert to the difficulty of making definitive judgments about deterrence in the absence-of valid and reliable information about Soviet and Chinese objectives and calculations. McGeorge Bundy, in his masterful Danger and Survival, tells a cautionary tale of the impatience of leaders to acquire nuclear weapons, their largely futile attempts to exploit these weapons for political purposes and, finally, their efforts through arms control, to limit the dangers

Citizens against the MX: Public Languages in the Nuclear Age by Matthew Glass

technologyand culture Book Reviews 633 the factors they weighed in decision making. Bereft of context, their decisions often seem the product of conspiracy. Related to these problems is the narrow focus of Gerber’s research in primary sources. She exploited recently declassified Hanford docu­ ments but did not carry her research into some important collections located elsewhere. She did not consult the records of the Manhattan Engineer District, the AEC, or the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, which are in the custody of the National Archives. Surprisingly, she did not examine the papers of Washington senators Henry M. Jackson and Warren Magnuson and of Hanford health physicist Herbert M. Parker, which are available at the University of Washington. Although Gerber does not have to go into production reactor or fuel reprocessing technology in depth, she needs to display a firm grasp of one scientific topic—the health hazards of radiation. Unfortunately, she does not adequately treat uncertainties about the health effects of low radiation doses or relate them to Hanford radiation release decisions. Too often she fails to examine limitations of experimental results and relate them to activities at Hanford. For example, her discussions of research on the effect of reactor effluent on fish (p. 117) leave the impression that radioactivity was the sole cause of fish mortality when other causes were surely operating. Distressingly, she does not cite standard secondary works on radiation and its health effects, such as J. Newell Stannard, Radioactivity and Health: A History (National Techni­ cal Information Service, 1988). Gerber should, however, get credit for tackling a difficult and controversial topic, one which will challenge scholars for some time. Roger M. Anders Dr. Anders is a historian with the Department of Energy. He is the author of Forging the Atomic Shield: Excerptsfrom the Office Diary ofGordon E. Dean and is working on a study of the problems of commercial nuclear power. Citizens against the MX: Public Languages in the Nuclear Age. By Matthew Glass. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Pp. xxii+188; notes, appendix, bibliography, index. $29.95. Arguably one of the most remarkable things about the end of the Cold War has been the rapidity with which the outstanding issues and concerns of those days have receded into dim memory. The QuemoyMatsu crisis, over which the United States almost went to war in 1958, seems as remote and irrelevant today as the Punic Wars; even the SDI debate is beginning to have a dreamlike quality about it. Another seemingly life-and-death issue at the time, which will soon provoke only blank stares or nostalgic recollections, is the controversy that dogged the Carter administration over the MX missile; the tenwarhead behemoth that the air force hoped to deploy in the western 634 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGYAND CULTURE United States, thereby closing the “window of vulnerability” that supposedly left this country wide open to a Soviet surprise attack. Those old enough to remember a Russia before Gorbachev and perestroika will recall that the military proposed a number of diverse and increasingly bizarre “basing modes” to render the MX itself invulnerable to sneak attack—including firing the missile from airplanes, moving it around inside a hollowed-out mountain, and even making it part ofan elaborate bait-and-switch ruse played over virtually the entire western desert, officially dubbed Multiple Aim Points but inevitably known as the “shell game.” The fact thatJimmy Carter, who entered office talking about the abolition of nuclear weapons, ultimately chose the most expensive and disruptive basing option for the MX—the shell game—made the missile a kind of tangible symbol of the fecklessness of his presidency. Merci­ fully, Ronald Reagan—after unsuccessfully proposing yet another Rube Goldberg-like solution to the problem—put an end to the MX dilemma by agreeing to base the missile in existing intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) silos. In the first part of this book, Matthew Glass, a sociologist of the American West, tells the story of the unlikely alliance of ranchers, environmentalists, Native Americans, and church leaders who banded together to—in the words of one westerner—“drag the MX down by hand” and stop the air force from playing the shell game in their backyard...

Linking Citizens to Government: Interest Group Politics at Common Cause.

List of figures List of tables Preface 1. Organized groups and the political system 2. A unified framework for understanding citizens' decision making: a theory of experimental search 3. Who contributes? 4. Why do citizens join groups? 5. The internal politics of organizations I: learning and retention 6. The internal politics of organizations II: activism 7. The internal politics of organizations III: leadership 8. Does group activity make a difference: the case of the MX missile 9. Does group activity make a difference? The politics of campaign finance 10. Conclusions: citizens' preferences, internal politics, and public policy Notes References Index.

Introduction: Military Spending, the American Economy, and the End of the Cold War

Paul Kennedy's (1987) retrospective and prophetic volume, The Rise and Fall of the caused quite a stir when it suggested that military spending leads to the downfall of the very nations that use it most heavily to project their influence internationally. Drawing on examples of Ottoman Turkey, Hapsburg Spain, Napoleonic France, and nineteenth-century Britain, Kennedy theorized that Great Powers, or major players in the world system, invariably suffered from imperial overstretch, an excessive spending on troops, navies, and weapons systems that saps investment from the civilian sector and contributes to the gradual erosion of their economic competitiveness. Eventually, as first-rate powers became second, then third-rate, ones, declining tax revenues from increasingly inefficient economies hampered the ability to project military influence abroad. It takes little imagination to apply Kennedy's warning to the world's foremost Great Power today. The strength of the Pax Americana since World War II was largely a reflection of the ability of the United States simultaneously to support an enormous nuclear arsenal, a large, well-equipped army, a navy with fleets in every ocean, specialized military operations in troublesome Third World contexts, a ring of military bases around the so-called Communist block, and various alliances with its subordinate partners (e.g., NATO, SEATO, ANZUS). In the 1980s, the U.S. military machine grew mightily under the Reagan administration. In the 1980s, Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger, it was said, never met a weapons system he didn't like. And so were born the B-1 bomber, the B-2 Stealth bomber, the Star Wars spacebased defense system, the Trident submarine, the MX missile, the cruise missile, the neutron bomb, a 600-ship Navy, the Apache attack helicopter, the Tomahawk missile, the F-16 fighter, and many, many others (some of which got their start earlier during the Carter administration). There was, and is, of course, a substantial economic and political cost to these operations. Officially, the Pentagon today consumes roughly 30 percent of federal expenditures, or $300 billion annually. However, other military-related expenditures are throughout the federal budget. Research for nuclear weapons, for example, falls within the domain of the Department of Energy; veterans' payments are included within Health and Human Services; military foreign aid (which comprises the bulk of U.S. assistance extended overseas) is part of the State Department's budget; and significant shares of NASA's budget arc also dedicated to military purposes, such as spy satellites. If these hidden costs are included, the Pentagon's budget may rise to as high as 50 percent of federal government expenditures (Wirls 1992). The differences between military and civilian markets have been clarified in numerous works (e.g., Ettlinger 1992). The Pentagon is a monopsonist-a single buyer in a guaranteed market-largely unconcerned about price or profit. Ostensibly, the main criteria underlying decisions to purchase weapons include quality and acquisition times. The demand for military goods and services, therefore, is

Decision Analysis: Society and Individuals

To the Editor. —In assuming that is nothing more than a collection of individuals, 1 Eddy has misconstrued the conflict between individuals and society regarding new medical treatment modalities. Individual people live in societies because societies can provide services to them that they cannot provide for themselves. These services range from national defense to public sanitation. In order to provide these services, society has needs that are distinct from the needs of its individual members. Thus, society may need such things as MX missiles and sewage treatment plants, for which an individual would have little use. Medical care, of course, is one of the more important services that a society provides to its members. Eddy gets to the heart of the matter when he states, there are no controlled clinical trials showing any benefit of high-dose chemotherapy with autologous bone marrow transplantation (HDC-ABMT). He then goes on to assume

Do Socioeconomic Regulations Discriminate against Small Firms?

Federal procurement laws subject all government contractors and subcontractors to a complex maze of what have become known as socioeconomic regulations. Purportedly, these regulations are a means by which the government can use its power as a large buyer-sometimes the only buyer-to force the business sector to help implement a variety of social policies, such as increasing employment opportunities for the handicapped and the minorities, raising wage rates in some specific industries, stimulating small business creation, reducing regional inequalities, decreasing national dependence on imports, and numerous others. In all, there are currently no fewer than 4,000 provisions of Federal Law and more than 64,000 pages of regulations affecting procurement. Consider, for instance, the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 which, in most respects, is a prototype of 37 major socioeconomic regulations. Aimed at expanding employment opportunities for the handicapped, this act requires businesses selling products and services to the Federal government to make reasonable accommodations, such as job restructuring, physical access, and job counseling for the handicapped. Failure to do so could result in the loss of Federal contracts and possibly court litigation. According to its critics, the Rehabilitation Act unfairly imposes additional costs of hiring and training the handicapped workers onto firms participating in the Federal contract market. (In fact, the Act does not require an estimate of costs nor an assessment of the ability of firms to pay.) Moreover, the critics contend that the socioeconomic regulations place small firms at a disadvantage relative to large firms, a consequence that appears to run counter to other economic objectives. Several reasons have been cited to support this latter contention. First, large firms supply unique products to the Federal government. The Stealth bomber, MX missile, Trident submarine, and space shuttle are examples of unique products procured from the large business sector. With their strong market power, these businesses are in a better position to pass the additional costs of hiring the handicapped onto their suppliers, the general taxpayer, or both. Second, large firms

Mighty mouse and MX missiles: Children in a violent society

Ours is a society in which violence, or the threat of violence, is a common experience for many children. Children's fears of the dark, the boogie man, and the headless Horseman have evolved to include fears of Darth Vadar, meltdown, and nuclear war.

The Democrats and the Dilemma: Morality, Interests, and Foreign Policy, 1988

THE DEMOCRATS AND THE DILEMMA: MORALITY, INTERESTS, AND FOREIGN POLICY, 1988 Christopher A. Padilla .he setting is all too familiar. The Democratic party, laboring under the foreign policy of an incumbent Republican president and eager for an electoral victory, sets up special task forces and study commissions to find a new American approach to the world. Hapless legislators, party leaders, and would-be presidential candidates are given a few weeks to redefine forty-year-old tenets of U.S. foreign policy, complete with position papers on a laundry list of specific foreign-policy issues. Eleven years ago, this list contained countries such as Angola and Cambodia and issues such as the cruise missile, the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, and human rights. Today, it contains Nicaragua, South Africa, the MX missile, and the Strategic Defense Initiative. Yet while the names on the laundry list have changed, there remains an underlying and unresolved conceptual debate within the party, one that goes deeper than today's cause célèbre to affect the roots of the American worldview. Nearly twelve years after the end of the Vietnam War, the Democratic party still lurches from one "new beginning" to another, struggling to regain a lost consensus on foreign policy and to solve the dilemma that has preoccupied Americans since the early 1970s: is there a foreign policy that will keep the United States a strong, proud, and involved world leader and simultaneously prevent future Vietnams? In 1975 liberal internationalism, the guiding principle of Democratic presidents since World War II, lay mortally wounded in the streets of Saigon. This forced the Democrats to begin a long and painful process of réévaluation, through which they sought to retain their ideals and eschew the discredited notion of militarized global containment. As much as the party might have wanted to fix the blame elsewhere, it recognized Christopher A. Padilla is a 1987 M.A. candidate at SAIS. 77 78 SAIS REVIEW that Vietnam was a war conducted by two separate Democratic administrations , initially supported by Democratic lawmakers, planned by Democratic bureaucrats, and, at least until 1968, justified by liberal Democratic ideology. Following World War II, Democrats operated under the generally accepted view that a world molded into the American image was not an unrealistic dream but a strategic and moral imperative. At the close of U.S. military involvement in Indochina the party faced a new and stronger imperative: no more Vietnams. Since then, the effort to reconcile this new noninterventionist goal with the traditional American desires to "stand tall" and to set an example for the world has been at the center of Democratic party foreign-policy debates. Of course, this post-Vietnam foreign-policy dilemma is not unique to the Democrats; it is a problem for U.S. foreign policy in general. Republican politicians, however, have had much less difficulty coping with the problem. They tend to engage in strong, almost crusading, rhetoric while remaining relatively more prudent in action. This deceptive imagery gives the impression of standing tall while avoiding the more dangerous actions called for by conservative Republican ideology. The Democrats, perhaps to their credit, have not tried to handle the dilemma by simply manipulating public passions. But as the Democrats grapple openly with the difficult problem of making America both strong and prudent, the Republicans' superior rhetorical ability to cope with that dilemma seems to have created a public perception of Republican foreignpolicy consensus and strength. If the Democrats want a foreign policy that is anything more than a criticism of Republican initiatives, the party must be able to reach some general agreement on how to handle the United States' post-Vietnam predicament. Achieving a consensus about the foreign-policy dilemma does not necessarily mean finding a solution. Republican flag-waving has not solved the dilemma—it has only postponed it, albeit effectively. Both parties have sought to avoid the frightening possibility that it is tragically but necessarily insoluble: perhaps a globally engaged great power cannot hope to avoid involvement in peripheral conflicts. Democrats have operated under the assumptions that there are lessons in the history of Vietnam and that consequently there must be some way out of the dilemma. Such assumptions...

SICBM Yes, HML No

AXlthough this essay will focus on an evaluation of the small ICBM (SICBM) and its possible basing modes, I will begin with a brief review of the tortured history of America's effort to modernize its land-based ICBM force, in order to place this newest missile in context. For two decades, the theoretical of silo-based missiles has occupied center stage in the ongoing debate over the proper structure of the U.S. nuclear retaliatory force. Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird brought the issue to the forefront in 1969 as the Soviets began deployment of their first crude MIRV-the SS-9 Mod4. The SS-9 Mod4 turned out to be not much of a threat to the Minuteman. But the ability to attack Minuteman appeared to be the motive behind the Mod4's design, convincing most American policymakers that the Soviets intended to develop the capability to destroy America's land-based ICBMs. By 1976, Paul Nitze had sounded the Klaxon even louder. The Soviets had begun deployment of true MIRVs, the SS-17, SS-18, and SS-19, and both the SS-18 and the SS-19 appeared to have substantial counterforce capability against fixed silos. In two impassioned articles, Nitze argued that the Soviets could deter our deterrent by launching a preemptive attack against U.S. land-based missile forces.1 The window of vulnerability was declared to be open wide. The Ford Administration, and later the Carter Administration, responded by moving to deploy the MX missile in a multiple protective shelter (MPS) basing mode. The MX itself had been conceived in the mid-1960s as the WS120A system identified in the STRAT-X study undertaken during Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's tenure. But accurate MIRVs had rendered deployment in silos problematic from the standpoint of survivability, even if the silos were super-hard. The mobility and deception inherent in the MPS basing mode seemed the only answer to concerns about surviva-

More Is Not Better

Given the size, composition, and essential missions of our current strategic force, I believe that we do not now need a new ICBM. At present, it is only necessary to proceed with an ICBM technology program. We can then begin full-scale engineering development if and when the specific needs for deployment become more evident. Our strategic arsenal will be more than adequate if we assume that it will be augmented by the currently programmed 50 MX missiles in fixed silos and 100 B-lBs, that the Trident procurement continues, and that we proceed with the development of a Stealth bomber and a second generation of air-launched cruise missile (ALCM). The pressure to increase our nuclear forces arises from our tendency to assume that military strength derives from numbers and details of weapons performance. Marginal differences in technical capability of weapons for conventional warfare can substantially affect the outcome of battles and of wars. But marginal differences in the strategic nuclear capabilities of the U.S. and the Soviet Union are inconsequential, except politically. Most would agree that by far the most important role of the U.S. strategic force is to deter a nuclear attack by an adversary. A degree of flexibility in the way that force can be used also provides deterrence against extreme nonnuclear provocations. But beyond a certain point, the idea of broadening the utility of nuclear weapons by being able to fight nuclear wars of varying intensity and to prevail in protracted nuclear wars is more problematic. It seems almost superfluous to point out yet again that the current retaliatory capability and the flexibility of use of nuclear weapons of each superpower is more than adequate for basic deterrence and can be readily maintained. Only if it totally neglected its nuclear forces-an unimaginable situation-could either side lose its retaliatory capability and the flexibility sufficient to extend deterrence. In fact, the pursuit of ever greater flexibility, of longer and specialized target lists, and of superiority in every imaginable level of nuclear conflict

Saying ‘No’ to MX: The Electoral Fallout

According to the Morgan Gallup poll the Hawke government's decision, in February 1985, not to help the United States monitor the testing of its MX missile, led to a massive if largely temporary decline in Labor's popular support, undermining support for the party in the States as well. The political importance of this polling was considerable. But an alternative reading of the evidence suggests that the impact of the decision was neither as great nor as widespread as Morgan and the media made out. The way in which the evidence was handled rather than the evidence itself put the government on the spot. In so far as the decision did undermine confidence in the government it was Labor's division more than its decision that did the damage.

Spectral lines: Behind the MX

What is the purpose of the MX missile? How does it relate to the Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”)? How will it lead to a ban on all nuclear weapons? At the height of the President's campaign in March to force a favorable vote on the MX by Congress, a group of national magazine editors and publishers were invited to a White House briefing for the purpose - at least in part - of hearing the Administration's views on these questions. President Reagan and his chief of staff, Donald Regan, addressed the invited group on a variety of topics, including the MX and the defense budget.

The Theoretical Foundations of Strategic Nuclear Deterrence

In the continuing debate about strategic issues, the vocabulary and theoretical concepts of strategic nuclear deterrence theory are now widely used to support inconsistent conclusions. Will deploying the MX missile enhance strategic nuclear deterrence or make it more difficult? Does the existence of mutually invulnerable strategic forces reduce the likelihood of major war, or does the strategic stalemate make conventional or limited nuclear war more likely? To the extent that contradictory conclusions are claimed to follow from a theory of strategic nuclear deterrence, these inconsistencies suggest a fundamental weakness in the theory or that those using the theory do not fully appreciate it and its limits. In either case, a reconsideration of the theoretical foundations of strategic nuclear deterrence may help to elucidate this debate. I shall examine these foundations by asking the most basic questions of nuclear deterrence theory. What, precisely, is being threatened in a nuclear threat? Are there different types of nuclear threats? If so, do they rest on different sets of assumptions or do they work in different ways? Nuclear threats seem closely related to escalation, but are there different types of escalatory processes? If so, in what ways do they differ? These are fundamental questions about the foundations of strategic nuclear deterrence theory. This analysis will attempt to answer these questions by describing two types of strategic nuclear threats. In the first type, a state raises the risk of an uncontrolled, explosive escalation to general nuclear war by engaging in what Thomas

Layered defense of deceptively based ICBMs

AbstractThe basing of ICBMs is a fundamental problem of defense analysis. Deceptive basing and antiballistic missile defense are two of the methods available to attempt to insure that there are ICBMs surviving after undergoing an attack. This article treats tradeoffs among missiles, silos or shelters, exoatmospheric interceptors, and endoatmospheric interceptors. Most of the analysis deals with 200 missiles, the number of MX missiles which were recommended to be moved among the 4600 shelters of the Multiple Protective Shelter (MPS) deployment, though some variants in the number of missiles (from 115 to 400) are also treated here. The basic reference point of the analysis is the provision of 1000 ICBM warheads delivered in a second strike. The combination of exoatmospheric interceptors and endoatmospheric interceptors is referred to as “layered defense.” Warheads are destroyed by interceptors after the warheads separate from the missile which carries them. Exoatmospheric interceptors are assumed to achieve a non‐nuclear kill, while endoatmospheric interceptors are assumed to achieve either a non‐nuclear or nuclear kill, depending on the technology available to both sides. Exoatmospheric interceptors may be capable of protecting value targets against the warheads of a second strike. To the extent that this can be achieved, they facilitate a first strike with relative impunity and hence are destabilizing. This article explores various layered defense topics.