ABSTRACT
By the mid-1970s, the United States had made all three decisions. It decided to avoid, if it could, the deployment of antiballistic missile systems (ABMs), and in 1972 the United States and the Soviet Union signed a treaty limiting ABMs to very low, nominal levels and banning the deployment of other forms of ballistic missile defence. The purpose of the present discussion is to illustrate the analytical manner in which the deployment of the M-X has been related to the objective of crisis stability. The primary purpose of the treaty was to provide a means for codifying parity in the number of deployed strategic delivery vehicles, and this was done by counting silos, submarine launch tubes, and certain kinds of bombers. This chapter is an edited version of a transcript of a lecture given to the Conference on the Development of Strategic Thinking in the 1970s: Prospects for the 1980s.
