ABSTRACT
The United States and the Soviet Union agreed to limit their respective deployments of strategic ballistic missile defences in a treaty of indefinite duration. The Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, as amended, allows the two countries just one ballistic missile defence site containing a treaty-defined mix of radars and no more than 100 interceptor launchers. The ABM Treaty and the issue of ballistic missile defence (BMD) in light of the end of the Cold War, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and, with it, the demise of the Soviet threat. The remaining threats to American security in this context appear to be political disorder and Murphy's Law. Russian opinion appears seriously split on the question of deploying additional ballistic missile defences. Russian commentators are more united, however, in their opposition to space-based interceptors, mirroring a long-standing Soviet concern that space-based ABM and anti-satellite (ASAT) capabilities would give the United States an undesirably dominant position in space and, mutatis mutandis, on earth.
