ABSTRACT
The UK was the first country ever to come under sustained ballistic missile attack, in 1944-45. Defence against these weapons has been a persistent topic of policy and technical investigation for the UK ever since. It has been a contentious political issue on three main occasions, each of them in response to a planned US deployment of defences. The UK’s own efforts to develop missile defences have largely gone unnoticed outside a small military and technical community. In fact, the greatest amount of work done in the UK in the field has actually been to overcome Soviet missile defences, rather than to produce them for the UK. At the end of the twentieth century, the UK was considering how to respond to an imminent US deployment of missile defences, and whether to acquire its own.
