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By Root 2857 0

missile and all its warheads and decoys were together — the best moment — right up to the point of re-entry of the earth’s atmosphere on its way to the target. Scientific advances opened up new possibilities to make such defence far more effective than the existing Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) defences. The main advances which appeared likely were in the use of kinetic energy weapons (which were non-nuclear and which, when launched at high speed against the nuclear missile, would smash it) and in the use of laser weapons. Even more challenging than the development of these different elements of SDI, however, was the requirement for an enormously powerful and sophisticated computer capability to direct and coordinate the system as a whole. Such an undertaking would not only require huge sums of money but also test the ultimate creative abilities of the western and communist systems competing for it.

The second element to be considered was the existing international agreements limiting the deployment of weapons in space and ABM systems. The 1972 ABM Treaty, as amended by a 1974 Protocol, allowed the United States and the Soviet Union to deploy one static ABM system with up to one hundred launchers in defence of either an Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) silo field or the national capital. The precise implications of the treaty for the research, testing, development and deployment of new kinds of ABM system were subject to heated legalistic dispute. The Soviets had started out with a ‘broad interpretation’ of the treaty which they narrowed when it later suited them. Within the American Administration there were those who pressed for a ‘broader than broad’ interpretation which would have placed almost no effective constraint on the development and deployment of SDI. The Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence always sought to urge the narrowest possible interpretation, which the Americans — rightly in my view — believed would have meant that SDI was stillborn. I always tried to steer away from this phraseology and made it clear in private and public that research on whether a system was viable could not be said to have been completed until it had been successfully tested. Underneath the jargon, this apparently technical point was really a matter of straight common sense. But it was to become the issue dividing the United States and the USSR at the Reykjavik summit and so assumed great importance.

The third element in the calculation was the relative strength of the two sides in Ballistic Missile Defence. Only the Soviet Union possessed a working ABM system (known as GALOSH) around Moscow, which they were currently up-grading. The Americans had never deployed an equivalent system. The United States assessed that the Soviets were spending in the order of $ 1 billion a year on their research programme of defence against ballistic missiles. Also the Soviets were further advanced in anti-satellite weapons. There was, therefore, a strong argument that the Soviets had already acquired an unacceptable advantage in this whole area.

The fourth element was the implications of SDI for deterrence. I started off with a good deal of sympathy for the thinking behind the ABM Treaty. This was that the more sophisticated and effective the defence against nuclear missiles, the greater the pressure to seek hugely expensive advances in nuclear weapons technology. I was always a believer in a slightly qualified version of the doctrine known as MAD — ‘mutually assured destruction’. The threat of (what I preferred to call) ‘unacceptable destruction’ which would follow from a nuclear exchange was such that nuclear weapons were an effective deterrent against not just nuclear but also conventional war. I had to consider whether SDI was likely to undermine that. On one argument, of course, it would. If any power believed that it had a completely effective shield against nuclear weapons it had, in theory, a greater temptation to use them. I knew — and post-war experience demonstrated beyond doubt — that the United States would never start