Reagan announces the Strategic Defense Initiative

Assembled from 20 blocks · 1 evidence · 10 related

1. Story
2. In a televised address Reagan proposed a research programme aimed at rendering nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete through defences against ballistic missiles. Technically the programme never came close to that; politically it was consequential in two ways. It challenged the premise of the 1972 ABM Treaty that mutual vulnerability was the basis of stability, and it was read in Moscow as an attempt to acquire a first-strike capability by neutralising retaliation — which is why it became the obstacle on which the Reykjavik summit foundered three years later.
3. Knowledge
4. Mutual assured destruction
5. The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty
6. Reagan announces the Strategic Defense Initiative
7. Connections
8. The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty
9. Mutual assured destruction
10. Mutual assured destruction
11. SALT I and the ABM Treaty are signed in Moscow
12. Reagan announces the Strategic Defense Initiative
13. The Reykjavik summit
14. The intercontinental ballistic missile
15. Second-strike survivability
16. The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty
17. SALT I and the ABM Treaty are signed in Moscow
18. Reagan announces the Strategic Defense Initiative
19. Evidence
20. Supports the limitation of ABM deployment areas and the reasoning that mutual vulnerability was being deliberately preserved, together with the treaty's termination on American withdrawal. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted; the site limits, the protocol date and the withdrawal dates are from standing knowledge and were not checked.