The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty

Assembled from 17 blocks · 1 evidence · 10 related

1. Story
2. The other half of the 1972 Moscow package, and the one that codified the strange logic of the whole period: each side agreed to leave itself undefended. By limiting anti-ballistic missile deployments to a small number of sites — two each initially, reduced to one each by a protocol in 1974 — the treaty deliberately preserved each side's ability to destroy the other, on the reasoning that a defence which might blunt retaliation would restore the incentive to strike first and set off a further offensive build-up to overwhelm it. It is the clearest available statement that stability was understood to rest on mutual vulnerability rather than on protection, and it was contested from the moment it was signed. Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative of 1983 was a direct challenge to it, and the treaty ended when the United States withdrew, having given the required notice in December 2001, with effect from June 2002.
3. Knowledge
4. Mutual assured destruction
5. The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty
6. Connections
7. Mutual assured destruction
8. SALT I and the ABM Treaty are signed in Moscow
9. Reagan announces the Strategic Defense Initiative
10. The Reykjavik summit
11. The intercontinental ballistic missile
12. Second-strike survivability
13. The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty
14. SALT I and the ABM Treaty are signed in Moscow
15. Reagan announces the Strategic Defense Initiative
16. Evidence
17. 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.