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Rip
Bulkeley Hans Günter Brauch
The
Anti-ballistic Missile Treatyand World Security
AFES-PRESS
Report No. 14
1988, 105 pp., ISBN 3-926979-00-3
€ 8.00 - £ 3.95 - SF 15.00 - $10.00
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The 1972
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty between the Soviet Union and
the former Soviet Union is the only arms control treaty which
ever stopped a part of the nuclear arms race before it got
going. The book was written in 1988 during the first serious
challenge to the ABM Treaty by the Reagan administration in
the aftermath of President Reagan's SDI speech of 1983. With
the announcement of the second Bush administration in 2001
to build a national missile defence for the USA this treaty
is once again being challenged and a new arms race may be
a consequence of a unilateral repeal of this treaty. The book
is organised in 8 chapters focusing after a brief executive
summary on the ABM Treaty, it discusses the question whether
the Treaty can survive, then it reviews the intentions, the
technology, the interpretation and the compliance problem.
In chapter 7 he focuses on Western security and the ABM treaty
and in chapter 8 it portrays efforts to preserve the ABM Treaty
that succeeded until 2000. The text includes a glossary, the
official texts of the ABM treaty, a list for further readings
and it points to three international committees that were
active during the late 1980s to preserve the ABM Treaty.
Rip
Bulkeley (Oxford, UK) and Hans Günter Brauch
(AFES-PRESS) have each written earlier full-length studies
of space weapons and the ABM Treaty, as well as numerous articles
in academic journals and in popular magazines. Their report
gives an independent and up-to-date assessment of this important
subject, and recommends policies in support of the ABM Treaty
which citizens all over the world should now be urging upon
their governments.
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