Congress vote on MX missile

This is the time of the year when anyone from abroad, asking how are things in America, should require you to say, 'Which part?' or when December comes in, you're made to realise that you're dealing with a continent more than a country.

The climates begin to pull far apart so that, as I speak, it's 79 degrees Fahrenheit in New Orleans, in northern New England it's well below freezing and out on the Great Plains in Montana, 22 below zero, which means 54 degrees of frost if you're out counting and all the old passes through the Rockies in the High Sierra are closed for the winter.

Here in New York and along the north-eastern seaboard, we've just had the first authentic nip of winter – a day bright as an icicle and sharp as a knife – after a freak of week in which golf and even sunning were very much on the menu. Last Saturday in the city here it was 72 degrees, the highest temperature ever recorded for a December day, but now we're back to normal, which is to say using the outdoors as a necessary interval of bundling up and going from one warm place to another, to unbundle and think vaguely about the MX missile and unemployment and our other general woes and to think precisely about the price of heating oil and whether something hadn't better be done now about the leak in the barn roof or the water tower.

The whole debate about whether to begin producing the MX missile – outside Congress it's not been so much of a debate as a public brawl – was given a mad touch on Wednesday when in mid-morning a man drove a white van up to the entrance to the great white pinnacle that soars over Washington, the Washington Monument. He was suspect the moment he got out of the van. He was wearing a full-body ski suit and a motorcycle helmet with its dark visor down. He had a backpack over his shoulders and a radio gadget in his hand that he identified in warning shouts as a detonator. He said the van was full of explosives and that it would take no more than the pressure of his thumb to blow up the famous monument.

For those of you who've never seen it, I ought to say something about the most successful and beautiful piece of architecture in a capital city that has a great deal of impressive architecture of various styles. It's a memorial to the nation's first president and when it was first mooted, there was a flurry of, in the main, awful designs. The thing was argued about throughout the nineteenth century. There was no Commission of Fine Arts as there is now to agree on a plan and it was due to the tireless lobbying and rhetoric for 37 years of one congressman that eventually Congress agreed to fall back on what this one man, Robert Winthrop, pleaded for – namely, a simple shaft, free from anything of tinsel or tawdry. It was to be a simple obelisk.

In 1888, it was finished and opened to the public. It's a shaft of stone blocks, 15 feet at the base, tapering to 18 inches at the top. It is, in fact, a beautiful, white needle built on a grassy knoll. It's 555 feet high, five times the height permitted by city ordinance to any buildings in the city's skyline. Of all American monuments, it is the one most sacred to the founding of the republic. It is all, and more, of what the Eiffel Tower is to Paris or Big Ben to London.

Through all the stormy days and nights of the 1960s, the riots, the race riots, the Vietnam protest marches and the like, it never occurred to anyone to defile or threaten the Washington Monument. So, you can imagine, the Washington police hotfooted it to the scene on Wednesday morning, heard the threats of the man in the ski suit and picked up a message that he gave to them through a reporter. It said: 'As an act of sanity, ban nuclear weapons or have a nice Doomsday!'

Well, he stayed there all day and he held nine persons hostage in the needle top of the monument and released them five hours later. The police settled in for a siege when, around 7.30 in the evening, he got into the van, disappeared for a moment into the shadow of the monument and then drove off down a slope and headed in the direction of the White House. The police had been ordered to hold their fire so long as the van stayed on the open grounds that surround the monument. They opened fire.

The van swerved and banged into a flag pole and keeled over on its side and, in the end, it was a mortally wounded man they dragged from the cab of the van. Identified later as 66 years old, once a tool- and die-maker from Miami Beach, a veteran of the Second World War with a criminal record of some misdemeanours and convictions for trafficking in drugs, but openly known to the neighbours and to the keeper of a hotel he once lived in as the head of a local anti-nuclear organisation.

It seems to me that there's a likelihood, at least, of his becoming sooner or later a martyr to the cause of... the cause of what? I don't know how to put it! – anti-nuclear, pro-nuclear freeze? – one of his pamphlets or messages carried the same slogan that many peaceable groups of protesters from Stockholm to San Francisco and Tokyo have carried, 'Ban Nuclear Weapons!'

Yes, indeed, it would be wonderful if we, they, all of us, did it, but how? Both the Soviet and the American governments say, over and over, that our side will never be the first to use a nuclear weapon. Both of them swear that they share the aim of destroying all nuclear weapons at some time in the future. When? When... when each side trusts the other to reduce its forces to those required for conventional warfare.

The assumption of so many fervently sincere protesters is that they are alone, bravely alone, in wanting no nuclear war and even the most knowledgable and most temperate advocates of a freeze of all nuclear weapons now say that nuclear plants and installations must be open to verification, that is, to inspection. Of course, they must but who is going to enforce the 'must'.

I was present in 1946 at the first session of the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission meeting here in New York when the chief American delegate, Mr Bernard Baruch, got up and started his speech and his proposals with the crisp sentence, 'We face a choice between the quick and the dead'. The Americans' main proposal was that atomic energy, as it was then called, should be place at once under the authority of the United Nations and that United Nations inspectors would be appointed to go freely and report independently into any country possessing the materials for making atomic weapons. At that time, only the United States had the materials or had set off a bomb.

The proposal, the crucial idea of inspection by an international body, indeed by any outsider, was turned down flat by the Soviet Union and they've been against inspection or verification ever since.

Nobody who's followed Soviet-American relations in the nearly 40 years since then can see how the United States and the Soviet Union, not to extend the hope to Western Europe and the Soviet Union, can come to trust each other, which is the one and only condition for any control of armaments leading to their abolition. So that all these billboard and placard imperatives, 'Ban the Bomb', 'Stop Nuclear War', are expressions of a desperate hope with no slightest indication of who is going to have the power to say 'Stop!' and 'You Must!'.

Well, on Tuesday, the public hassle or brawl left the streets and the marches and turned into a debate in the House of Representatives. The issue about which there's been for many months so much hot and angry partisanship was whether the administration is to be given, to be voted, the funds it has asked for to begin producing the MX missile in 1983.

I listened to this debate for several hours and I can say that it was one of the best I've ever heard. All the arguments we've heard anywhere, four or five sides of the nuclear argument, were aired. There was, as there always is, some sarcasm and blustering rhetoric but there was also a very great deal of cogent, informed and driving argument.

The ordinary citizen, the intelligentsia most of all, often talks about Congress as if it were a body of big mouths that won't ever get down to hard and honest facts. On the contrary, I'd say that nowhere in the United States is there a body of men and women who are so primed with knowledge, with enough expertise in the fields of nuclear planning and nuclear weapons and who have the gift of articulating their knowledge and their conflicting opinions with brisker intelligence.

The nub of the debate on which, in the end, the vote was bound to turn was simply this. Is there any point in voting money to begin producing the MX missile if there is yet no foolproof way of basing it on land? In the past few years, successive administrations have suggested scattering the MXs all over the continental United States. President Carter had the idea of putting them on trains always in motion so that the location of this one or this cluster could never be pinpointed by an enemy.

The Reagan plan is to put them all together in one part of Wyoming. It is known as 'dense pack' and the congressmen against the plan made some sharp play with the analogy that in December 1941 the United States air force had its own precursor of a dense pack plan by crowding all its airplanes on one airfield in Honolulu. 'If you want another Pearl Harbor', one congressman said, 'then dense pack is the plan you must vote for.'

Before the vote and before it got into the papers, a day later, the word got to the House that three out of five of the joint chiefs of staff have no trust in the dense pack plan so the House voted by a big majority against starting production of MX until there's a better plan for basing it. But that's not the end of the missile. Next day, the House voted two and a half billion dollars for further research into it but, just now, no production.

Only when the bill has been voted on by the Senate shall we know whether the Congress wants a better, foolproof MX missile or is inclined to think that the country can't afford it or doesn't need it.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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