Word: abm
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...agenda for his 3½ days of talks with Kremlin leaders was the sensitive issue of strategic arms control. Disappointingly little progress has been made since the first round of SALT negotiations ended in 1972. At that time, a treaty was signed on limitation of defensive missile systems (ABM'S), but an interim agreement on the deployment of offensive nuclear arms extends only to 1977. Unless some significant breakthrough can be made soon, the idyl of American-Soviet détente may be lost in the nightmarish shuffle of an accelerated arms race. Well aware that peripheral agreements...
...major accomplishment of SALT I was its ban on widespread installation of anti-ballistic-missile (ABM) systems. Under the terms of the treaty, the U.S. and the Soviets were allowed to erect anti-nuclear-rocket defenses at only two sites-one to protect each country's capital, the other to shield an intercontinental-ballistic-missile (ICBM) launching site. So far, each nation has installed ABMs at only one site. Moscow has been ringed by the Galosh ABMs, while the U.S. has protected its ICBM launchers at Grand Forks...
...ABM expansion spared both superpowers the cost of installing many units of the defensive systems. It also would help to deter nuclear war, according to the Strangelove theory of strategic analysts, by exposing the civilian populations in both countries to attack. This policy of "mutually assured destruction," strategists believe, has been largely responsible over the years for preventing nuclear...
...removed its nuclear-submarine bases from Scotland and Spain, 2) reduced the number of its aircraft carriers and prohibited all missile-carrying submarines from operating within range of the Soviet Union, and 3) stopped further research and development on new strategic bombers, air-launched missiles and sophisticated anti-ABM devices. U.S. negotiators ridiculed the Soviet demands as "outrageous." Little progress has been made on SALT II since then...
Critics of mutual assured destruction think the strategy's acronym is well-deserved; undoubtedly, it is an M.A.D. basis for national survival. There is something particularly ironic about Nixon and Brezhnev, all smiles and champagne, signing an ABM Agreement which prohibits either side from defending itself against a missile attack by the other. You and I and millions of other Americans are Brezhnev's hostages in the game of nuclear strategy. President Nixon gave us to the Russians in return for the right to hold a hundred million Soviet citizens as his hostages. So it goes...