Vince Houghton - Nuking the Moon - And Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Left on the Drawing Board

But what if we kept them on the surface? Another proposal called for putting missiles on barges that would be towed in random directions along American inland and coastal waterways. Ship-Inland called for the use of fourteen hundred barges to tug missiles over fourteen thousand miles of coastal waters, twelve thousand miles in the Mississippi River system, and three thousand miles on other inland waterways.

The problems with this plan were twofold. First, barge locations would be hard to hide. Soviet satellites, or even local human intelligence assets here in the United States, could easily spot the barges chugging up and down the Mississippi. And while they would be a moving target, they wouldn’t necessarily be all that hard to sink. Furthermore, “moving so great a number of nuclear weapons on heavily traveled waterways is potentially a severe threat both to public safety and to missile security.”

“Potentially”?

Maybe, then, we could get those missiles far away from the American homeland? The Ship-Ocean concept called for using specialized surface ships to move MX missiles randomly across the high seas. The ships (about sixty-five of them, with forty at sea at any given time) would each carry eight MX missiles, with up to ten warheads apiece.

Unfortunately, command and control of forty ships widely dispersed over the world’s oceans could be a nightmare, and since the locations of the ships would be pretty obvious through the Soviets’ use of surveillance satellites, trailing ships, and submarines, “the ships are extremely vulnerable to surprise attack by enemy ships, submarines, tankers, aircraft, and missiles.”

So it can be killed by… everything?

And if a cargo ship puttering around the ocean is too extreme for your liking, the Dirigible plan is the choice for you, Grandpa! Blimps /airships/dirigibles actually had a significant advantage over most every other air-mobility basing concept: endurance. They could float for days, casually moving from place to place at a leisurely pace. They could also carry a lot of weight—perhaps up to three hundred thousand pounds of payload, or three MX missiles.

The problem with dirigibles, as you might have guessed, is how ridiculously easy they would be to track and destroy. Another difficulty is the risk factor: “There is much controversy concerning the operational feasibility of dirigibles, particularly in regard to safety and reliability in adverse weather conditions and ground handling.”

Oh, the humanity.

One way to avoid having our missiles crash, sink, get run over by cruise ships, or stolen by pirates is to keep them safely on land, inside the confines of the continental United States. The Commercial Rail plan called for special trains carrying MX ICBMs to use already existing commercial railroads in less populated parts of the northwestern United States. This wasn’t a new idea: The same kind of rail mobile concept had been entertained in the early 1960s for the Minuteman I deployment.

But it was dismissed as impractical and dangerous then. So why would things be any different in the 1980s?

They weren’t, per a review of the project, “Public safety and safety of the missiles pose insurmountable problems…. Simultaneous operation of commercial and nuclear missile trains within or near populated areas poses an unacceptable hazard to the civilian population.” Not to mention it would be “virtually impossible to conceal train locations from enemy agents.” A KGB spy could just sit and watch the railroad tracks, or, if they were really ambitious, recruit someone within the railroad office to provide the train schedules. As a result, “The mobile units would likewise by susceptible to sabotage or paramilitary attack.” All an enemy would need is a small explosive placed on the tracks. Can you imagine the public reaction if a train carrying ICBMs derailed outside of Cheyenne, on the outskirts of Las Vegas, or while traveling through Denver?

So commercial trains are out—even a dedicated system would be impossible due to the time and space it would take to build what would be an entire railroad out west. If we’ve done planes and trains, it must be time for automobiles.

Two plans, known as Off-Road Mobile and Road Mobile (New Missile), proposed bringing the MX to the nation’s highways and byways. Off-Road Mobile called for a fleet of 220 tractor-trailers with off-road capabilities. Each vehicle would carry one MX missile, and would continuously travel in seemingly random patterns to confuse Soviet intelligence and to maximize the potential for survival. The vehicles, however, would require ninety thousand square miles of dedicated land from which to operate, which is about the size of Great Britain, or about eighteen thousand square miles larger than all six states that make up New England.

The Road Mobile (New Missile) wouldn’t need any additional operating space, because it would use the already existing highways that stretch across the country. The trucks would be staged inside American military bases until international tensions prompted their deployment. The plan went this way: Once the United States received strategic warning of an impending Soviet ICBM attack, 375 trucks would depart sixteen military bases and use forty-five thousand miles of road (traveling at a constant 30 mph) until they were dispersed over an area of three hundred thousand square miles. Security, command and control, and communications personnel and equipment would follow along in a convoy of vans.

One major problem with this proposal was warning. Unless the trucks could be dispersed onto the roads at least two hours before an attack, the system was essentially worthless.

But that’s not the biggest issue. There were two others that doomed the proposal:

1. “Given sufficient warning, there is also the possibility that traffic jams will delay dispersal.” Always a pain in the ass when lousy drivers get in the way of mutually assured destruction.

2. The Soviets would obviously know when we were deploying these assets. They watched our military bases anyway, as a part of their broader intelligence collection efforts. If, all of a sudden, hundreds of nuke-carrying trucks rushed out of sixteen of our bases, they would most certainly notice, and the action “might invite an immediate attack because the Soviets would know that they had one to two hours to launch their missiles after which an attack would not succeed.” Our need to protect our missiles might be the spark that starts World War III.

My favorite of the nearly thirty scrapped MX basing mode proposals was the Ground Effect Machine, or GEM. I don’t love it because it was the best idea of the bunch. In fact, it’s probably one of the worst. Really, it’s one of the least likely to succeed, despite its harsh competition for ineptitude.

I love this proposal because the GEM is a fancy way of saying a hovercraft. And hovercrafts are awesome. And zooming nukes around the western United States on hovercrafts is nerd nirvana.

This plan is so indefensible that the only reason it was included with the others has to be because of the military geekiness of the technology itself. I can imagine the conversation at the Pentagon:

General #1:Ooh, how about we use a hovercraft for the MX!

General #2:Sweeeeeeet.

Some poor staff major:Sir, that doesn’t seem to have any chance of working.

General #1:Of course not. But it’s a hovercraft, Major. Get with the program, son. [excited whisper] A hovercraft .

General #2:Hovercrafts are awesome.

It was a silly idea. They should have done it anyway.

Instead, they finally decided on a program called the MX/MPS, which stood for Multiple Protective Shelter system. Two hundred MX missiles and their launchers are randomly distributed throughout the country among forty-six hundred shelters. Every so often, the missiles are moved from one shelter to another—or they pretend to move them. It’s the classic shell game. Keep the Soviets guessing. They would never be able to target the American nuclear arsenal with the certainty of eliminating all of it in a first strike. For all they knew, they could be targeting empty shelters.