ANTI-BALLISTIC MISSILE TREATY

The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (usually referred to as "the ABM Treaty") was signed by U.S. president Richard Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow on May 26, 1972. It entered into force on October 3, 1972. Under its terms, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to limit sharply both development and deployment of ballistic missile defenses in order to constrain the arms race in strategic nuclear weapons and to enhance the stability of the strategic balance. The ABM Treaty was the principal achievement of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), which also produced an Interim Agreement limiting strategic offensive missiles, pending negotiation of a more comprehensive treaty limiting such weapons. The ABM Treaty was of indefinite duration, although it could be amended by mutual agreement and either party could withdraw at any time on six months' notice.

The ABM Treaty was the centerpiece of the Nixon-Brezhnev Moscow summit of 1972, and the SALT negotiation was seen as the icebreaker for a broader political détente, as well as a stabilizing element in strategic arms control. Strategic arms control and the ABM Treaty enjoyed wide support for most of the next two decades. This was true despite the prolonged and ultimately inconclusive efforts to reach agreement on a SALT II treaty on offensive arms.

By the time Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, American concerns over the strategic balance had risen. In 1983 President Reagan announced a Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) to develop strategic antiballistic missile defense systems. Deployment, and even testing and development, of such a system would have required radical revision or abrogation of the ABM Treaty. In 1985 the Reagan administration announced a unilateral revised interpretation of the ABM Treaty loosening restrictions on testing new ABM technologies. This revised "broad interpretation" of the ABM Treaty was highly controversial and was never applied to actual testing; in 1994 it was officially repudiated by the Clinton administration. The SDI program greatly increased expenditures on U.S. ballistic missile defense research and development, but it did not lead to a deployable system.

In the 1990s and afterward, following the end of the Cold War and agreed reductions in U.S. and Soviet strategic offensive arms, the United States renewed its pursuit of ballistic missile defense. On December 15, 2001, President George W. Bush officially gave notice that the United States was withdrawing from the ABM Treaty in six months. Discussions had been held with the Russians on possible amendments to the treaty, but the United States decided that it wished an open slate for development and deployment decisions and opted to withdraw.

The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty thus had a thirty-year life. The ABM Treaty alone had been unable to restrain a buildup in strategic offensive arms in the 1970s and 1980s, and it was less needed in the post–Cold War world, although many in the United States (and the Western allies, Russia, and China) had urged its retention. In any event, the ABM Treaty did contribute to greater certainty of mutual nuclear deterrence for nearly two decades of the Cold War, and even the fact of its successful negotiation had borne witness to the ability of the nuclear superpowers, even as adversaries, to agree on such a measure to reduce the dangers of the nuclear confrontation.

See also: arms control; cold war; strategic arms limitation treaties; strategic defense initiative; united states, relations with

bibliography

Garthoff, Raymond L. (1994). Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan, rev. edition. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution.

Newhouse, John. (1973). Cold Dawn: The Story of SALT. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Smith, Gerard. (1980). Double Talk: The Story of SALT I. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Raymond L. Garthoff