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August 3

Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty Ratified (1972)


On August 3, 1972, the United States and the Soviet Union ratified the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABMT) in order to limit the use of anti-ballistic missiles. An anti-ballistic missile (ABM) is a missile designed to counter ballistic missiles (missiles used to deliver nuclear, chemical, biological or conventional warheads). The term "anti-ballistic missile" describes any anti-missile system designed to counter ballistic missiles.

The American armed forces began experimenting with ABMs soon after World War II. Defenses against Soviet long-range bombers took priority in the later 1950s, when the Soviets began to test their missiles. The first experimental ABM system was the Soviet V-1000 system, closely followed by Nike Zeus, the United States’ first system.

With the United States and the Soviet Union having the ability to destructively counter any attack, the concept of mutually assured destruction (MAD) arose. MAD is a doctrine of military strategy and national security policy in which a full-scale use of nuclear weapons by two opposing sides would effectively result in the destruction of both the attacker and the defender (i.e. both sides would destroy each other).

With fear of mutually assured destruction, in which the U.S. believed it was better to have no defense than one that might trigger a war, the U.S. first proposed an ABM treaty in 1967. This proposal was initially rejected. By 1972, however, an agreement had been reached to limit strategic offensive weapons and strategic defensive systems. The ABMT allowed each country two sites at which it could base a defensive system, one for the capital and one for ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) silos.

The treaty was signed in Moscow in May 1972 by President Richard Nixon and the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev. It was ratified by the U.S. Senate on August 3, 1972.

The ABMT was in force for the next thirty years until the U.S. withdrew from it in June 2002.