The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty

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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.

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