HEXAGON Book Series
Human and Environmental
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Book Series > AFES-PRESS Reports > apr014

 

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

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.

apr014; Language: English; Areas: ballistic missile defence, arms control, ABM Treaty; Region: United States, Soviet Union.