Word: abm
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Within two weeks of Russia's initiative, the U.S. has demonstrated a willingness to indefinitely prolong large nuclear arsenals despite the U.S. pledge for nuclear disarmament under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. U.S. plans for maintaining thousands of nuclear weapons and for altering the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty to allow deployment of a limited national missile defense (NMD) system came to light in a leaked document that appeared in the New York Times on April...
Because the offense can more easily build weapons to counter the defense, the ABM treaty placed strict limits on missile defense, specifically preventing defense of a whole nation. It, therefore, set bounds on the nuclear arms race during the Cold War and continues to foster nuclear arms reductions...
...Star Wars" missile defense system. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was forced onto the defensive Monday at a U.N. conference on nonproliferation, with even U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan supporting Moscow's reasoning and warning that U.S. efforts to build a missile defense system could jeopardize the ABM treaty and restart the nuclear arms race. Although Russian president Vladimir Putin got his legislature to ratify the START II agreement slashing U.S. and Russian missile fleets, he made it conditional on Washington's adhering to the ABM pact. But unless that treaty is renegotiated - which the Russians right now show...
...Unimpressed by Washington's insistence that the program is directed against rogue states, the Russians complain that the missile defense system eviscerates the whole basis of the ABM treaty: that both sides have an equally destructive attacking force. They argue that missile defense neutralizes an opponent's missile fleet, which creates a disparity that they are not prepared to live with. But building missiles is a lot cheaper than building anti-missile systems, so the response to an opponent's defense system is to simply build more missiles than it could eliminate - hence the Russian warning that...
...those side agreements still have to be ratified by the Senate, and hard-line Republicans there vow to block them, claiming their passage would strengthen the ABM Treaty, which they want to kill, and make it harder to deploy a national missile defense...