The Last MX Missile

So, they've finally decommissioned the last MX missile in Wyoming! (NY Times Select article link)

I remember the MX from working at the Kirtland AFB Weapons Lab in the late 70's. The Lab had been tasked with carrying out and analyzing explosive tests on mockups of portions of the underground racetrack network, and also carrying out a number of computer simulations to aid in the design of the network.

The Big Idea was that vast - and I do mean vast - areas of the rural, western U.S. would be riddled with underground tunnels, through which large MX missiles would move, night and day, in a cat-and-mouse game to prevent the Russians from ever locating the missiles closely enough to make a first strike practical. If we needed to nuke the U.S.S.R., hydraulic rams would break through the tunnels, punch through the overlying dirt and prop the missiles up. Then the missiles' solid fuel rockets would quickly take the nuclear warheads to where they could do the most damage.

The desire was to make the U.S. nuclear deterrent invulnerable to a Soviet first strike. Improvements in Soviet missile guidance, coupled with huge Soviet warhead sizes, were calling into question whether the U.S. land-based missiles could survive a Soviet first strike.

There was a fantasy element to the whole project. The first-strike potential was worrisome, of course, but since we already had missiles on virtually-undetectable submarines, the urgency of the project seemed overdrawn - doubly so given the small size of the individual American MX warheads (tens of kilotons, if I recall correctly) doing the attack.

Fantasy-like elements reared their heads up all the time. One day, I asked my boss what he was doing. He said he was trying to evaluate, if a hundred Soviet nuclear warheads detonated simultaneously in a typical western U.S. Basin-and-Range valley, whether one could simultaneously drive a tank through a mountain pass into the valley, or whether the tank would be blown off the winding road by the winds howling through the pass. "Oh," was all I could muster in reply.

The Reagan Administration eventually decided to place the MX in silos instead, and severely cut back on the number of missiles ordered. The NY Times article implies the decision to back off the underground-tunnel idea was forced by western governors, who did not relish turning a quarter of each of their states into military reservations for the MX tunnel network. And who could blame the governors? I have no doubt that there was some pressure there.

Nevertheless, my memory is of something quite different. I heard a story that the engineers had discovered a horrible fact: the interlocked tubular network exposed a new vulnerability. The tubes could be designed to withstand the tremendous overpressures of shock waves travelling through the tubes resulting from Soviet atomic detonations in the network, but the underpressures immediately following the shock waves were another problem altogether: the tubes would crumple instantly, like a Bill Murray anti-gopher 'Caddyshack' fantasy, trapping and damaging all the American missiles at once. One well-placed Soviet bomb could wipe out an entire network.

So, then, the hawkish fantasists of the Reagan Administration were forced by an inhospitable political environment and an uncomfortable technical reality to scratch the tubular network, and treat the MX program not as a technical revolution but as just a missile upgrade, and put the missiles into still-potentially-vulnerable silos.

Billions spent, and pretty much wasted!

I wonder if the even-more hawkish and even-greater fantasy-ridden Bush Administration could ever be forced by an uncomfortable reality to scratch a particular approach to a weapons program (missile interceptors, anyone?)