MX funding agreed

I wanted to talk about one curious and uniquely American spring custom and so I shall, but I'm afraid we cannot skip an American event that is likely to affect the lives of all of us.

On Tuesday evening, the House of Representatives came to a vote on something that has been argued about since 1972, that the Carter administration proposed in 1977, that has divided the two parties more than any other issue during the four years and three months of Mr Reagan's presidency. Let's just remind ourselves of its battered history.

It's the good old, or the poor old, MX, christened 13 years ago as a nickname for 'missile experimental'. It was designed to replace the current IBMs, the intercontinental ballistic missiles and when it was first proposed, we were told, when Mr Nixon was king, that it was a sovereign remedy for curing any Russian leader who had an itch to press the button. It was originally designed to be mobile, but for a couple of years or so, nobody could agree how it was to be moved around.

At one time, the Pentagon nearly sold its supporters on a system which Buster Keaton, with the help of the Marx Brothers, might have invented. The idea being to put the missiles on different trains and have them shunted in such unpredictable directions, always on the move between the states, that the Russians wouldn't know where to spot them and bomb them. Well, considering that a train can go, at best, say, 150 miles an hour and that any one of the Russians' intercontinental missiles can pinpoint a target at 6,000 miles and swoop in on it at, what, a speed of conservatively 400 miles a minute, the chances of the Russians hitting most of the right trains and, of course, a few carrying lettuces and artichokes from California seemed rosy for them.

But, even before it was decided where the MXs were going to be based on land, sea or air, Congress, after a fractious debate, voted to build 21 of them and let it go at that. The contracts went out and, right now, 28 states have a part of the action, six of them, from California to Massachusetts, being responsible for the main components.

Since then, the administration decided that the missiles could be stored in secret silos. I don't believe there has ever been a weapon, certainly not since the invention of the tank threatened the pride and usefulness of the cavalry, a weapon for which so much and so little has been claimed. The MX has a range of over 6,600 miles. Each MX has ten separate nuclear warheads that can pick out their own targets. Each warhead has the destructive force of 300,000 tons of TNT.

The supporters of the MX say that it can, at a stroke, or rather 21 strokes, 42 strokes, a hundred strokes – the president wants, in the end, one hundred MXs – can modernise America's deterrent power and by modernise, they mean restore the old balance of terror, since the Russians already have a flock of similar weapons. The president said that if Congress voted this time to build another 21 of them, it would be sending to the Russians an important and unmistakable signal of American unity and resolve.

The opponents say the silos wouldn't be secret for long and the MXs would become sitting – and wildly expensive – ducks. Some say the weapon is not merely vulnerable but useless and Speaker O'Neill who led the fight in the House to defeat it said the overall cost of 100 missiles – $40 billion, that's forty thousand million dollars – would wreck the economy of America as a starter.

Well, on these arguments, the Senate voted last week by 45 to 35 to pass the bill that would authorise the money and that was certainly a triumph for Mr Reagan, but now the bill went to the House which always has the last word on any money bill. The House was more narrowly divided, both by opinion and party loyalty since the House has a majority of Democrats, and if the president was going to have his way there, somebody would have to perform a miracle of persuasion, of lobbying, to produce a Democratic revolt in favour of the missile.

Now, in such crises, presidents do not personally go cajoling congressmen. They leave it to their leaders in Congress. They do go on the air and make moving appeals, mixed in with blood-curdling threats, to the people. For the rest, they sit in the White House biting their nails with dignity and wait nervously for the word from the House. Not this time. Mr Reagan's unpredictability has become the most predictable thing about him. He was that artful persuader, that whiz-bang lobbyist.

At the end of last week, it looked pretty clear that the House, with its heavy load of Democrats, would vote against the MX. So, on Monday, Mr Reagan brought his chief arms negotiator – a conservative Democrat, by the way – back from Geneva and set him ducking in and out of the offices of wobbling Democrats. He, the president, sent military buses up on to Capitol Hill and packed them with one hundred, carefully chosen, uncertain congressmen, mostly Democrats, and had them bussed to the White House. They came and listened and he conquered.

On Tuesday night, the House voted specifically to release one and a half billion dollars to build 21 more MXs; 158 Republicans voted yes, 189 Democrats voted no, but 61 Democrats yielded to the Reagan plea and the Reagan charm and the final vote was 219 for, 213 against. Talk about a sign of American unity! If three congressmen had switched their votes, the MX would have lost.

It is, no question, a staggering coup for the president. True, this bill only authorises so much money to be spent for such a general purpose. There remained the real money bill, the appropriations bill. How much money goes for what. Well, two days later, the House voted again and appropriated the money by a vote of 217 to 210.

The important thing to say about the House votes is that it wasn't all Reagan charm and the gift of the gab that swung those 61 Democrats against their leader. It was the juicy bait of many thousands of new jobs in 28 states, many of them in industrial depression. Remember, a congressman, as distinct from a senator, is in Washington for only two years. In that time he has to bring home a visible piece of bacon to his constituents if he wants to be re-elected and it's no secret that Mr Reagan made this fact of congressional life painfully clear to many congressmen whose desks are piled high with letters from the unemployed.

In the meantime, Mr Reagan covered up this bit of practical bullying by having his arms controller, Mr Kampelman, lobbying on the hill on a higher plain. The MX, he was preaching, was crucial as a bargaining chip in the Geneva arms talks. Well, the Russians had an answer to the bargaining chip ploy. They said, in pungent variations, ridiculous! The idea that the passage of the MX would help the Geneva talks to succeed was, they added, a total lie.

Well, there it is! It's done and all I can say, just now, is that it would be amazing if the Russians, for their part, didn't dream up a bargaining chip equally unacceptable to the Americans, which would produce what you can call either a more touchy balance of terror or a stalemate.

Now, what does the rite of spring mean to you? To poetry fans, it said that it's time for young men to turn to thoughts of love. To musicians, it will always recall the dreadful night in 1913 when Stravinsky produced his ballet with that title and the music horrified the audience so much that many of them put on an actual riot. But in America, the rites, plural, of spring means only one thing. Baseball spring training.

Now what is spring training? It is as much of a national folk festival as a clam bake, Halloween, the Oscars, the Fourth of July. It's the time when the big league baseball players settle in in Florida for a month or more of practice, of training, at the end of the winter, before they retire to their separate cities and some local dignitary tosses out the first ball and the national game begins another season.

More than 50 years ago, the master short story writer, Ring Lardner – who, by the way, would be one hundred this year, now, alas, forgotten – Lardner wrote some, droll, unforgettable stories about spring training and, more recently, the late and incomparable Red Smith turned out once a year a flock of wonderful pieces, all impressing on us the picture of shrewd, if sometimes semi-literate, baseball giants down in Florida, practising in the morning, in the afternoon, chipping in 50 cents each and taking bets at the two-dollar window at the nearby racetrack.

They put their families up in boarding houses or rented garages and in the evening the boys would congregate at the local saloon, something called The Blarney Stone or Joe's Eats and bloat themselves on steaks and French fries and beer and, next morning, unbloat themselves with stretching and jumping and practising cut-offs, run-down, pivots and deep slides into base.

Now, a recent report from St Petersburg, Florida, from Boswell – Tom Boswell, that is, of the Washington Post – reveals how unrecognisably times have changed. Now, the morning practice begins with ballistic stretching. Then a batter faces a whirring robot which delivers every sort of nasty ball. If you're bruised, where once you nursed the elbow for a couple of days or a week, now you have diathermy, deep heat, ultrasound. A really serious injury entailing surgery and you are out for a year? Now you get arthroscopic surgery and are back on the mound in a fortnight.

They don't live in garages any more. They own quarter-million dollar condominiums by the beach. They still get together in the evenings, but they patronise places called The Colony or La Lumière and delicately consume blanquette de veau, red snapper en croûte, brown rice and Perrier water. They still go to the races, but to back a horse owned by their favourite player.

Well, as the man said, 'You can't stop progress!' Not when your buddies earn one or two million dollars a year.

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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