STRATEGIC DEFENSE IN THE MISSILE AGE
Strategic Defense, 1954-1962
As the 1950s
progressed, thermonuclear weapons began to enter the arsenals of both
superpowers.
Nuclear weapons were no longer just potential war-winners --
they were now nation-killers. Just as the new and massive network of air
defenses began to come online in the late 1950s, a second Soviet technological
surprise threatened to make these defenses obsolete: Sputnik. Though in retrospect
it is clear that the U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program quickly surpassed
that of the Soviet Union, the Soviet ICBM in 1957 was an even greater shock than
the Soviet atomic bomb had been in 1949. By the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis,
both sides had recognized that the United States actually remained far ahead in
the nuclear arms race, but as the world entered the era of "Mutual Assured
Destruction," the distinction for being the side which could "make the
rubble bounce higher" was becoming an increasingly uninteresting one.
It was the mere presence of what McGeorge Bundy has called "nuclear danger" that
mattered now, not nuclear "superiority."
Strategic Defense, 1962-present
The prospect of utter national annihilation was simply too much for either
side to accept willingly, however, and throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s
both superpowers struggled unsuccessfully to create effective
anti-ICBM defenses. The 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty slowed
these efforts, but neither side ceased development work completely.
President Ronald Reagan's 1983 announcement of the "Strategic Defense
Initiative" (SDI) brought the race back out into the open, and even
following the end of the Cold War, successor programs to SDI have quietly continued,
coming to the attention of the American public only intermittently. As the United
States entered the 21st-century, the nuclear threat environment became very
reminiscent of that of the immediate post-war period. Enemies were once
again believed to be striving for nuclear weapons, and once again no one was certain just how
long it might take them to succeed, or by what means they might deliver them to
their targets.
