Poetry, Part Forty

On the walls of the 91st Strategic Missile Squadron were pictures of larger, and more numerous, red Soviet missiles along side the three smaller U.S. missiles in the active arsenal: Titan, Polaris, and Minuteman. (And the largest U.S. missile, the aging Titan, was also in need of replacement.) Size, indeed, seemed to matter.

To assuage the feelings of inadequacy that this unfair comparison engendered, the positive spin became that our MIRV's were far more accurate than theirs, which was certainly true enough. Our nuclear warheads did not have to be as destructive nor carry as much megatonage to do comparable damage to Soviet forces as their big "blunderbusses" would do to ours.

The U.S. was, however, developing a larger missile, designated the MX. Eventually, the Peacekeeper missile would be completed and deployed into former Minuteman silos in Wyoming. But until that scenario played out, all sorts of wild schemes were discussed and depicted. (Originally, even Minuteman missiles were considered for rail deployment so that the Soviets could never easily hit a moving target because the rail-borne delivery system was always on the move at any time of day or night.)

One of the more exotic and expensive ideas for deployment of the MX was to build many bunkers, up to ten different sites for each single MX missile. Like an elaborate shell game, the missiles could be moved randomly among the several concrete bunkers so that the Soviets would not be able to target any one bunker as easily and would have to target all of the sites where a live missile might be contained at any one time. However, the amount of concrete alone that would be necessary to build the hundreds of bunkers, in addition to the interconnecting miles and miles of roads in the wilderness of Utah or Arizona or Colorado or Idaho or wherever they were eventually constructed, became absurd to even contemplate. I'm not sure the government even wanted to calculate the environmental impact of such a massive complex. Furthermore, to provide security for constantly moving nuclear weapons in the middle of what was formerly nowhere was going to be another nightmare.

The most ludicrous deployment scenario, to me, involved interconnecting trenches dug underground. The buried missiles could pop up through the thin layer of soil and be launched. Sadly, the comparison to earlier, deadly warfare was too easy to imagine, and reject.

Fortunately, as I wrote earlier, the more cost-effective decision was simply to place them into modified Minuteman missile silos at one Minuteman missile base in Wyoming, F.E. Warren, and be done with them. When the Soviet Union crumbled not long after full deployment, and the goal was then to reduce the number of offensive missiles on both sides, the Peacekeepers were negotiated away and the Minuteman missiles remained at just three bases, including Minot.

But until the history of ICBM's actually played out in the next decade and more, the MX program was food for poetic conjecture on my part.

MX

They threaten now
and again of using trenches.
New trenches for our future defense
as an old attrition.
Again we settle in at our tables for this stagnation.
For we have it best.
This same front will bleed us a new way:
without our blood, so we need not ration.
Gambling in our cards with renewing fevers
and renewable obsessions.
Not needing lessons from this present siege
to compare with the past.
At most we require a more prolonged protection:
Payments stretched to begin now what we may need then:
Newer weapons aging to be replaced
on terms beyond our own.

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