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SDI: A Flawed Approach
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13447 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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9 / 1987 |
2,768 Words |
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Paul C. Warnke
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Strategic defense has always been both a major stimulus and a major problem for nuclear arms control. It was U.S. concern about the possible Soviet deployment of a strategic defense system that led to the effort, in the late 1960s, to engage the Soviet Union in the strategic arms limitation talks (SALT).
In June 1967, at Glassboro, New Jersey, President Lyndon Johnson met with Premier Alexei Kosygin, who was in the United States to attend a UN session. This was an impromptu summit, largely occasioned by U.S. worries about Soviet plans for an antiballistic missile (ABM) defense. Then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had become increasingly concerned about what he termed "the mad momentum of the nuclear arms race." In the evolution of his strategic thinking, he had come to realize that stability and peace in the nuclear age required that each side be relieved of the fear of a preemptive nuclear strike by the other. To him it was clear that the only security available to either nuclear superpower lay in an assured retaliatory deterrent.
With this condition of mutual deterrence, neither side could contemplate gaining any military advantage from initiating a nuclear attack. Even more important, neither side would be panicked into contemplating a first strike for fear that its forces could not survive a preemptive attack and that therefore it lacked that retaliatory deterrent.
Both at Glassboro and for some time thereafter, the Soviet leadership resisted the concept that restrictions should be placed on strategic defense. They argued, as do today's supporters of the Reagan administration's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), that defense was a preferable alternative to deterrence through threat of retaliation and that the so-called balance of terror could be replaced by a situation of assured survival through defenses that would make weapons of mass destruction ineffective.
Many in the U.S. Congress echoed the Soviet view that defense was inherently good and only offensive weapons should be restricted. The problem of the Soviet approach to security through ballistic missile defense was that any available technology could readily be overwhelmed by increases in offensive forces. In fact, the U.S. development of multiple independently target able reentry vehicles (MIRVs) was driven by concerns that nationwide Soviet ABM deployments would cast in doubt the efficacy of the U.S. second strike, retaliatory capability.
Eventually, the logic of the U.S. approach prevailed, and the Soviet Union agreed in 1972 to a treaty limiting each nuclear superpower to two ABM deployment sits, with no more than 100 defensive missiles at each site. In 1974, the treaty was amended to limit each country to one ABM site, which could protect either the national capital or an intercontinental ballistic missile field.
The Soviet Union, at the time of the ABM negotiations, had deployed a ballistic missile defense around Moscow. The United States elected to build an ABM system in Grand Forks, North Dakota, for ICBM protection. The Soviets have maintained the Galosh ABM system around Moscow and increased the number of defensive missiles from the initial 64 to the treaty maximum of 100. The United States concluded that the Grand Forks deployment was not worth the cost of maintaining it in operational readiness, and it was put in
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