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Reagan announces the Strategic Defense Initiative

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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.

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