< PREVIOUS ] [ 1989 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
For a decade, our leaders have been looking for a place for the MX missile. The missile carries thermonuclear warheads, and treaties limit the number of warheads America might deploy.
But treaties do not limit the number of missiles. So the idea is to have a lot of missiles that look alike, although only some of them are armed. To eliminate our force, an enemy would have to zap the thousands of MX-lookalikes in order to be sure of eradicating the hundreds of real MX's.
It's like the old carnival shell-game with three walnut-shell halves and one pea, and you're supposed to guess which one the pea lies under. To be sure of getting the pea (the missiles with real warheads), you'd have to grab all three walnut shells (all the things that look like MX missiles).
The first plan was to spread MX missiles through the deserts of Utah and Nevada, with roads between bases. Missiles, some armed and most not, would constantly shuttle along the roads.
That scheme was about as popular as pornography in Utah, and so our political process devised another MX strategy.
Now the Pentagon wants to put MX missiles, armed and otherwise, aboard railroad cars, and shuttle them around the country. The railroad cars will be based in Cheyenne, and Wyoming is welcoming them.
Wyoming should. In fact, if this goes through, along with another plan to put Midgetman missiles on trucks that look like commercial trucks, all of American business should welcome this plan. It will contribute both to prosperity and international understanding.
Talk to any businessman who has to deal frequently with rail and truck shipments. His days are consumed with worry and frustration. Nothing ever arrives on time, nothing ever ships on time, and when he calls the shipper, nobody there ever knows where anything is. A given boxcar, bound from Portland to Denver, might be sitting in the Oakland yards, on a siding in Montana, or just a hundred yards away -- nobody knows. The same, by and large, is true of trucking companies.
Now suppose that every semi trailer or boxcar in America might be carrying a ballistic missile which might have a bomb on its nose.
The Soviet Union may not do a lot of things very well, but by all accounts, the KGB is a very efficient spying organization. The only way the KGB could do its job would be to track every boxcar and every semi-trailer in the United States. And so it would be done, at tremendous expense.
Whatever drains the Kremlin treasury is already presumed to be good for us, so already our defensive posture is improving.
But now that free enterprise is making inroads over there, it wouldn't be long before some bright KGB director realized that he was spending tons of rubles to acquire information that imperialist exploiters would pay dearly for -- the whereabouts of boxcars and semi-trailers.
No matter how much you despise the Russians, you'd call the KGB office for information about a delayed shipment. They could provide it in an instant, at a very reasonable fee, since their operation is being subsidized by the Soviet Defense Ministry. Whereas when you call the tracing department of your shipper, you can wait days, even weeks, and still not learn anything.
With such information, shipping would improve in America; our economy would prosper. The KGB would become an indispensable source of vital commercial information. The money the KGB received for dispensing that information would certainly be welcomed by the moribund Soviet economy.
The result would be a world where nobody could afford to go to war, since real conflict would result in too great a commercial disruption. The saber-rattling and blustering would have to continue, of course. Without that, there wouldn't be the American mobile shell-game missiles, and the Soviet need to keep track of all possible missile sites, and the resulting information that would make both nations more prosperous.
Way back when, President Reagan used to call the MX
the Peacemaker.
And now I see how it is so.
< PREVIOUS ] [ 1989 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >