Space-Based Ballistic-Missile Defense

Abstract

For two decades both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. have been vulnerable to a devastating nuclear attack, inflicted by one side on the other in the form of either a first strike or a retaliatory second strike. This situation did not come about as the result of careful military planning. “Mutual assured destruction” is not a policy or a doctrine but rather a fact of life. It simply descended like a medieval plague—a seemingly inevitable consequence of the enormous destructive power of nuclear weapons, of rockets that could hurl them across almost half of the globe in 30 minutes and of the impotence of political institutions in the face of such momentous technological innovations.