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BY THE MID-1960S the nuclear arms race was becoming ever more intense. The United States was constructing a thousand underground launch silos for its new Minuteman ICBM, capable on very short notice of delivering nuclear weapons to Soviet territory in less than thirty minutes with considerable accuracy. The Soviet Union was deploying hundreds of ICBMs itself, and by the 1970s was threatening to exceed the U.S. total. Soviet ICBMs were less accurate than 48 4 Strategic Arms Control Legitimizes Space-Based Reconnaissance the U.S. Minuteman, but the larger nuclear warheads deployed with their missiles had significantly greater explosive yields. Indeed, the Soviet SS-9 ICBM carried a 25–megaton nuclear warhead, in contrast to the largest warhead yield of about 1 megaton on the new U.S. Minuteman missiles. However, in the 1970s both the United States and the Soviet Union began to deploy MIRVed warheads, which had smaller yields—in the hundreds of kilotons. Because the newer missiles were more accurate and the warheads considerably more numerous, these MIRVed warheads could achieve the same, indeed greater,destructivepotentialassingle,largebutlessaccuratewarheads.1 Both sides were also planning the development and deployment of antimissile missiles, or antiballistic missile systems (ABMs). The advent of this technology threatened to exacerbate the arms race in two ways. First, it undermined deterrence theory in that if country A were to build an ABM defense, country B might fear that once the defense was in place, country A could carry out a first nuclear strike against the strategic forces (ICBMs, submarine-launched missiles, and long-range bombers) of country B and use its ABM defense to ward oª the substantially weakened retaliatory attack by country B. Country A could thus win a nuclear war. As a result, if country B perceives that the ABM defenses of country A are superior to its own, it may decide that it had better be sure to strike first in a crisis. Thus, crisis stability, which is maintained by a roughly equal balance of strategic forces, is undermined. Second, arms race stability is undercut as well in that if one side builds more ICBMs to overcome the ABMs of the other side, then the second side likely would conclude that it needs more ICBMs and perhaps should add to its ABM deployments, and so it goes. Without question something needed to be done or the nuclear arms race would get completely out of hand. In 1967 President Lyndon Johnson raised with Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin at the Glassboro, New Jersey, Summit meeting the possibility of limiting ABM deployments . In 1968 the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to begin negotiations on both oªensive (missiles and bombers) and defensive STRATEGIC ARMS CONTROL AND SPACE-BASED RECONNAISSANCE 49 (ABMs) strategic nuclear systems. However, the agreement was derailed by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. Only after President Nixon took o‹ce did the SALT negotiations formally begin in Helsinki, Finland, in November 1969. As one participant in the negotiations stated, There are a number of considerations which have brought the two countries to the conference table to discuss strategic arms limitation. Among the most important are: first, the emergence on each side of a perception of mutual deterrence and rough strategic parity; secondly, an awareness on each side that another round in the arms race, while costly in terms of human and material resources, would almost certainly not bring greater security to either country; and third, the availability on each side of intelligence collection systems capable of monitoring the military programs of the other country without infringing on its territory. The development in intelligence techniques and capabilities, required by the imperatives of the race in strategic armaments, have helped create the conditions in which the two sides can move toward verifiable limitations on such armaments.2 The objectives of the SALT negotiations were further refined in an exchange of letters in 1971 between President Nixon and Soviet General Secretary Brezhnev, which called for a treaty limiting strategic defensive systems and the first-ever interim limits on strategic oªensive systems. It seemed that the modest steps taken to cap strategic oªensive nuclear forces were accepted by the Soviets as the price required to stop the U.S. ABM buildup. However, it was not clear that either side was as yet willing to consider more comprehensive constraints on their oªensive nuclear forces. But to reach even these modest objectives, the agreed-upon constraints...

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