Introduction

Abstract

Anti-ballistic missile defence (ABM) is, paradoxically, a concept whose time has never really come, but which has seldom been out of the news. The notion of creating a means of protecting one’s country from the attack of an enemy armed with nuclear missiles is one which provokes strong emotions, as anyone who has examined, lived through or participated in the debates surrounding US President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) can testify. But while the arguments made for and against missile defences in the United States and Europe are familiar to many Western students of international relations, Russia’s side of this story is far less well-known. This is despite the fact that, throughout the second half of the twentieth century, the Soviet Union amazed and alarmed the Western world by the persistence of its interest in developing and deploying a missile defence system. This book represents an attempt to explore the reasons behind Moscow’s drive for an ABM capability in the context of a military and political rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States which affected every aspect of international politics between the onset of the Cold War in the late 1940s and the collapse of the Soviet Communist Party’s rule and the disintegration of the USSR itself in 1991.