Ballistic Missile Defence and the Strategic Balance

Abstract

I n the years since the flurry of anxiety in the United States about an illusory ‘missile gap’ in I960, the impression has grown that the increasing numbers of strategic missiles possessed by the United States and the Soviet Union have created a completely stable balance of mutual destructive capacity that no effort on either side could upset. This has bred a sense of having attained a plateau of effort, both technical and intellectual. The weapons such as Minute-man and Polaris, now widely deployed, have been regarded as adequate for the foreseeable future, thereby promising sharp reductions in expenditure on strategic forces; and there is a parallel impression that the theoretical work on a strategic doctrine for the use of such weapons has been substantially completed.