Word: abm
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...addition, they offered last week to stop construction on a giant phased-array radar in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia. This facility has been cited by Reagan's defense team as a major Soviet arms-control violation because such installations are permitted only along borders under the terms of the 1972 ABM treaty. In return for halting work on the nearly completed radar, the Soviets demanded that the U.S. stop upgrading two advance-warning radar complexes in England and Greenland, neither of which falls under the provisions of the ABM treaty. Said Under Secretary of Defense Fred Ikle, one of the Pentagon...
Earlier this month National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane astonished many arms-control experts by announcing on NBC's Meet the Press that wide-open testing and even development of the space-based Strategic Defense Initiative, as Star Wars is formally named, is "approved and authorized" by the ABM treaty. "Only deployment (of SDI) is foreclosed," McFarlane claimed. This was an abrupt reversal of U.S. policy. Previously, everyone had assumed that Article V of the treaty meant what it said: the U.S. and the Soviet Union were committed "not to develop, test or deploy ABM systems or components." The Pentagon accordingly...
McFarlane's new interpretation is said to have originated with Pentagon hard-liners, including Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle. They argued that the ABM limitations do not apply to new technology. In 1972, the only operational missile-killing systems consisted of interceptor missiles fired from fixed ground sites. Negotiators attached to the treaty a rider known as Agreed Statement D, specifying that any new forms of ABM defense "would be subject to discussion." In the Pentagon reading, that clause exempted "exotic" systems, such as laser and particle beams, from the prohibitions of the pact. "Crazy," replied John Rhinelander, former...
...week they conceded, in the arms- control talks at Geneva, that some SDI laboratory research would be acceptable. The U.S. contends the Soviets have broken the treaty by building a ! big radar installation near Krasnoyarsk in Siberia. Thus Reagan and Gorbachev will have quite enough opportunity to argue about ABM adherence. The last thing they needed was another explosive interpretation to dispute...
From the same point of view we approach what is called the SDI research program. First of all, we do not consider it to be a research program. In our view, it is the first stage of the project to develop a new ABM system prohibited under the treaty of 1972. Just think of the scale of it alone--$70 billion to be earmarked for the next few years. That is an incredible amount for pure research, as emphasized even by U.S. scientists as well. The point is that in today's prices those appropriations are more than four times...