How A Reporter And A State Senator Killed The MX Missile In Utah

The headline is clickbait, I admit it.

Nothing is ever simple. Many parts go into everything. National and international considerations were part of the MX "Peacekeeper" missile's life, and death.

Still, at one point in time our government DID want to base the thing in Utah, building thousands of miles of massively expensive concrete highways to nowhere for it. It might have happened, too, except that the silliness of that idea -- thousands of miles of highway nowhere -- did finally get pointed out. Politicians finally had to admit it was silly. The LDS church even had to admit, finally, that it was silly.

So the part played by that reporter, and that state senator, are easy to overlook, but were critical. Sometimes the tiny pebble that overturns the cart remains unseen, but still that cart is tipped.

The MX missile was a 1970s attempt to prevent nuclear war by building more and better missiles. If you are unclear on why that was a thing, go rent "Dr. Strangelove" and have a look. Missiles and mine shaft gaps: All play their part.

The idea was that the US would base those missiles above ground, in Utah and Nevada. They'd be put on trailers and hauled around on from one shelter to the next, playing hide-and-seek with Russian spy satellites. A vastly more full description of the thing can be found here (click.)

Since memories are short, and stuff that happened last year is ancient history, not a lot of folks remember this. I found a file on the MX missile while working at Weber State University's Special Collections library recently.

The library has acquired the Standard-Examiner's complete clip files, the paper files cut out and pasted carefully into file folders. I have the job of doing the initial sort on them--putting them back into alphabetical order after decades of bad storage and neglectful filing by careless reporters (myself included.)

Handling the thousands of file folders full of clips, it is impossible not to look inside and be fascinated. Newspapers are history in the making, and their morgue files were repositories of decades of fascinating stories, day by day, as they happened. When I checked out the file folder for the MX, a lot of memories came flooding back.

In many ways, the news coverage paralleled any major defense  program: Environmental impact is pondered, economic impact is cheered, people say it will be good or bad based, mostly, on whether it will be good or bad for them. Tiny towns in the middle of nowhere cheered the idea of massive construction crew coming to town.

And the military did its best to make it look good. It weighed heavily on the idea that the basing system would only cover 25 square miles. This is where Sen. Frances Farley, a democrat from Salt Lake City, comes into the story. And a reporter.

Sen. Farley was an amazing woman who had that very uncommon thing called "common sense." She also had a calculator, and when she was at one of the public hearings about the MX missile basing system she took that calculator out.

The idea was that the missiles would be in shelters dotted all over the Great Basin between Nevada and Utah. When the Air Force talked about 25 square miles, it was only talking about the 2.5 acres around each of the shelters, not the 4000-plus shelters it would build on 200 loops in the middle of the desert, nor the 5,000 miles of concrete highways connecting those loops.

What would it look like? The S-E did publish a map:

But when the Air Force is going on and on about a mere 25 square miles, well, who cares about 25 square miles.

Peter Gillins who was, back them Associated Press Bureau Chief, said he was sitting in a hearing on all this and happened to be sitting next to Sen. Farley, who had her calculator. He said Farley took our her calculator, punched in some numbers on roads and shelters and so forth, and showed the result to Gillins.

"This is insane," she said to him, or something similar.

"Stand up and tell them that," Pete said he told her. So she did. And she did again, and again.
In Nov. of 1979 she spoke to the Sierra Club in Ogden, and reporter Bob Anderson, at the S-E, did a great job of reporting her outrage at how idiotic the proposal was.

While there were "only" 200 loops for the missiles to be driven around, she said, there would be 4,600 shelters for them, each on its own 2.5 acres of fenced land.

There would be 5000 miles of road connecting them -- that's enough highway to go from New York to California and back again. While that might mean some temporary jobs during construction, she said, it would be a boom-and-bust deal, with maybe a few thousand permanent jobs.

Speaking of booms: One of the calculations in building this was that, if the Soviet Union ever tried to attack the MX system, it would be forced to attack ALL those 4,500 shelters in hopes of getting all of them. Ponder 4,600 nuclear bombs, all going off, within 500 miles of Salt Lake City.

At what cost? Estimates were $30 billion, in 1979, or more than $100 billion in today's money. I remember seeing promotional pictures of those highways out in the desert, showing a cyclist pedaling along one, the alleged civilian benefit of the things, but what cyclist is going to drive 100 miles to nowhere to nowhere on circles of highway in the middle of nowhere?

"When the Air Force tells you about 25 square miles being fenced, they're not telling you of 20,000 or 25,000 square miles to be fenced," she told the Sierra Club. "Those highways go to no place. What are they going to do, put a Holiday Inn at every loop for the tourist business?"

Utah politicians, upon studying the thing, started grumbling and asking more questions. Congress balked at the cost, and eventually the whole thing was put in missile silos instead.

There are those who say the LDS Church, in a statement issued in June of 1981, killed the racetrack system as far as Utah and Nevada are concerned. The statement (here: CLICK)  discusses environmental and cost concerns, but it also gave Utah's lawmakers much-needed backing to oppose the thing.

But hard facts help. A thinking state senator and her calculator helped put them into play.