ABSTRACT

This book, first published in 1983, analyses the technical and political developments in the two decades after the 1972 Soviet-American ABM treaty. It signposts the route for discussion of the antiballistic missile question – with its shared tacit assumption that nuclear war is for deterring and not fighting – and examines the dangerous tendency to conduct the ABM debate of the 1980s with the technical and political assumptions of the 1960s.