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The current Western strategy of Flexible Response represents a delicate balancing of the various interests and concerns held by the Allies on both sides of the Atlantic. The West's ability to launch small nuclear attacks--including attacks by U.S. central strategic systems--against a full range of militarily relevant targets currently is a keystone of the Flexible Response concept. To erode that strategy by undermining even in part our limited strategic attack capability could lead to a number of potentially severe political and military problems. For this reason, great caution is warranted as we consider certain strategic policy issues, most notably, whether to include active defense as a component of some follow-on U.S. ICBM system configuration. The author concludes that, as we make critical strategic choices over the next few months and years, it is vital to recall that U.S. and Soviet strategic aims and contexts are by no means symmetric ones. Certain key asymmetries--relating to the conventional theater balance, our need to achieve a political consensus for important weapons and strategy choices, and the like-should inform our ICBM modernization decisions in the near-term. Based on the discussion presented in this report it would seem that the net effect of such considerations would be to support every effort possible to devise an MX basing concept that does not rely on active defense.
Should the US deploy ballistic-missile defences? The arguments for and against are becoming increasingly polarised. This paper offers what is currently lacking in the debate: a quantitative analysis of how well defences would have to work to meet specific security objectives, and what level of defence might upset strategic stability.
Defense against nuclear attack—so natural and seemingly so compelling a goal—has provoked debate for at least twenty years. Ballistic missle defense systems, formerly called antiballistic missile systems, offer the prospect of remedying both superpowers' alarming vulnerability to nuclear weapons by technological rather than political means. But whether ballistic missile defenses can be made to work and whether it is wise to build them remain controversial. The U.S.-Soviet Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972 restricts testing and deployment of ballistic missile defenses but has not prohibited more than a decade of research and development on both sides. As exotic new proposals are put forward for space-based directed-energy systems, questions about the effectiveness and wisdom of missile defense have again become central to the national debate on defense policy. This study, jointly sponsored by the Brookings Institution and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, examines the strategic, technological, and political issues raised by ballistic missile defense. Eight contributors take an analytical approach to their areas of expertise, which include the relationship of missile defense to nuclear strategy, the nature and potential applications of current and future technologies, the views on missile defense in the Soviet Union and among the smaller nuclear powers, the meaning of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty for today's technology, and the present role and historical legacy of ballistic missile defense in the context of East-West relations. The volume editors give a comprehensive introduction to this wide range of subjects and an assessment of future prospects. In the final chapter, nine knowledgeable observers offer their varied personal views on the ballistic missile defense question.
The authors assess alternatives for a next-generation intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) across a broad set of potential characteristics and situations. They use the current Minuteman III as a baseline to develop a framework to characterize alternative classes of ICBMs, assess the survivability and effectiveness of possible alternatives, and weigh those alternatives against their cost.