ABSTRACT
Carefully avoiding a direct challenge to the party leadership, Marshal Akhromeev, the new chief of the General Staff, nevertheless issued an oblique reminder that Soviet military security should not be jeopardized. Akhromeev asserted that if the antiballistic missile treaty ceased "for any reasons" to be in force, this would destroy the basis on which negotiations over strategic arms could be conducted, and he offered a historical excursus that may have been meant to show that in the absence of such restraints the party could not afford to neglect strategic defense. If the US commitment to Strategic Defense Initiative seems firm in the late 1980s, the first Soviet military response is likely to be to develop and prepare to deploy effective defense-suppression weaponry that could attack a space-based ballistic missile defense system directly.
