Opponents confident of killing MX plan

Press, 25 November 1982, Page 8

Opponents confident of killing MX plan

NZPA-Reuter Washington

President Ronald Reagan’s plans to modernise what he calls “antique” American nuclear missile forces face an uncertain future in Congress. His proposal for basing the powerful new MX missile has run into stiff opposition, and the Pershing 2 has failed an accuracy test. Mr Reagan has said he wants to deploy 100 of the MX missiles in an arrangement called “dense pack” at Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming. The theory behind his proposal is that the explosion of a first attacking Soviet warhead would destroy or deflect others, leaving at least some MXs unharmed and capable of a retaliatory strike. Conservatives and Liberals in Congress, which must approve the basing plan, are sceptical. Two key Democrats have said that they will fight to kill the MX. Leading advocates of arms control argue' that the plan would not deter war as the President asserts, but would threaten the Soviet Union with a nuclear firststrike.

Tass, the Soviet news agency, took the same line. In a report from Washington yesterday, it described the MX as a nuclear first-strike weapon and “an instrument for unleashing nuclear aggression.” This is Mr Reagan’s second bid to find an acceptable basing system for the MX. Congress rejected his earlier proposal, as it has those of three earlier Presidents.

A Democrat senator, Ernest Rollings, whose anti-MX campaign earlier this year failed in the Senate by only four votes, says he now has enough support to kill the programme. A similar effort by Congressman Joseph Addabo, in a key . House of Representatives defence committee which he heads, was only narrowly defeated. He said yesterday that he would take the issue to the full House where he expects to do much better.

The Defence Secretary, Mr Caspar Weinberger, refused to predict if the $3O-billion MX basing plan would be approved, and another senior American official told reporters that there was “a mood of retrenchment” in

Congress. Mr Reagan’s pledge to modernise America’s nuclear forces ran into another problem yesterday when the Army announced that a Pershing 2 missile tested last week had failed to achieve the desired standard of accuracy.

The Pershing 2s — 108 — are due to be deployed in Western Europe, starting in December next year; as part of a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation agreement. A Congressional ' subcommittee has voted to eliminate funds for the missile from Mr Reagan’s 1983 defence budget; and the embarrassment of another failure will make it more difficult to convince Congress to restore the money. In July the missile failed its first long-range test, exploding shortly after launch. Several later attempts were postponed because of problems with its electrical circuits and monitoring systems.

Pentagon officials said that in the most recent test the missile had failed to manoeuvre and hit its target with the desired accuracy because of a loss of hydraulic pressure. But they said

that the setback would not delay its deployment. Mr Reagan has embarked on a $l6OO billion arms programme to counter what he views as a relentless Soviet military build-up and to close America’s “window of vulnerability.”

In London the British Prime Minister, Mrs Margaret Thatcher, yesterday backed Mr Reagan’s bid to deploy the MX. She rejected a suggestion by Michael Foot, Leader of the Labour Opposition, that the plan breached the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty with the Soviet Union.

“The United States is perfectly entitled to take steps to modernise the programme of its own strategic nuclear force,” she said in the House of Commons. “That was what the announcement about the MX intercontinental ballistic missile was.

“I don’t accept it would necessarily undercut the S.A.L.T. agreements. One should remember it was President Reagan who made proposals about disarmament, and we are waiting for a response from the. Soviet Union,” she said.