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Show A ir Force SffOflOEipliafl1 m Ul the Congress and the news media to heed the findings of the vast majority of responsible and well informed in-formed scientists and engineers en-gineers who support MX as this country's last hope of countering the Soviet drive toward strategic superiority. su-periority. Perhaps by the time the 1980 election cam -paing is over, the program can be cleared for full scale engineering development of both basing mode, and missile design. ventory. Because of the hardness of the silos and the requirement for certainty, cer-tainty, it would take two warheads per silo. MX is definitely not dependent de-pendent on SALT II coming in to effector being followed by an equivalent agreement covering the period when MX will be deployed. de-ployed. Possibly the greatest threat to MX is not the Soviets but a small vocal group of scientists on the fringe of strategic weapons design who are promoting pet schemes often of dubious du-bious merit. As in the case of any proposed wea-- wea-- po:i system, It is possible to postulate larger than life threats to MX that, if valid, would make its de -velopment unwise. What is clearly needed is for The case for MX is inseparable in-separable from the logic that makes land based ballistic bal-listic missiles the keystone of strategic deterrence and, for the foreseeable future, provides the only realistic hope of limiting nuclear war to levels be -low virtual annihilation of both sides' civil population. With submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBM) once detected and pinpointed, pinpoint-ed, a single Soviet torpedo, detph charge, or warhead relatively close to a Trident Tri-dent sub would destroy the boat and the 24 C -4 SLBM which accommodate 240 warheads. Conversely, the prospect of having to expend at least 23 or morelikely forty six highly accurate, high yield reentry vehicles in order to be reasonable certain of destroying one MX missile STILL CAPTIVE ! II II III II " "ITT i l l' :':Z.-..JIi?j hiding in any one of 23 alternate, al-ternate, hardened shelters will act as a disincentive for the aggressor. Attacking the MX or any other land based ICBM located lo-cated in the American heartland forces an aggressor ag-gressor into the open. Such an attack would, involve a very large number of ICBM warheads with a flight time of about thirty minutes from Soviet launch sites to US targets. We would have time to react. MX is needed because Soviet breakthroughs in ICBM IC-BM accuracy coupled with incraasad ICBM deploy -meat has made the US silo based ICBMs vulnerable. Until MX restores the survivability of the land based ballistic missile force later in this decade, the other forms will have to be the backstop, The baseline MX system that emerged from studying ai least 35 different basing bas-ing modiis calls for de -ploying 200 missiles and 4,600 shelters in a closed loop pattern. This mode is designed to assure that about 507c of the MX mis- -siles - each carrying ten warheads - can survive the predicted Soiet. threat. If built up to full capacity such an MX system : oil) -bined with ABM defenses, could survive an attack by 20,000 Soviet RVs. aagft wjuipii ii m .tm 3a&mizztvl The sites are planned to be on public land - two and one half acres per shelter shel-ter - with total area of the entire project expected to be about 7,000 to 8,000 miles. Only 25 square miles mi-les will be -fenced. The public will have complete acess to the approximately 10,000 miles of road required re-quired by the system.. All MX systems offer the option of backfill, meaning that in case of greater than anticipated growth of Soviet warheads, the nuin - , ber of shelters can be increased in-creased quickly and economically., eco-nomically., The fact that we have ways to keep the system sjrvivable serves as a powerful deterrent, against that very enlargement enlarge-ment of Soviet forces. General Hecker said that backfilling makes it possible pos-sible to double thenum-x ber of shelters without re -quiring a significant a-mount a-mount of additional land, and no land outside the initial deployment areas. These shelters - at about $2.,2 million each - would be less expensive than the Soiel cost of building and deploying additional warheads war-heads , - Dr. Seymore Zelberg calculates that an attack on 800 Mnulemen ICBMs would drain oft 1,600 highly high-ly accurate, high yield war -heads from the Soviets in-. .. . . . i. |