BMD Technologies and Concepts in the 1980s

The public debate concerning strategic defenses against nuclear weapons, seemingly laid to rest by the 1972 ABM treaty, resurfaced in the early 1980s. This resurgence of interest was brought about, in part, by technological advances in a number of different fields: new possibilities for weapons systems employing laser and particle beams and kinetic energy projectiles, along with advances in guidance and sensing systems, optics, and computer processing seemed to make ballistic missile defense a more attractive and realistic proposi tion than it had been in the 1960s and 1970s. This chapter will review how these new technologies might be incorporated into a multilayered BMD defense system of the sort being studied by the Strategic Defense Initiative. (For a more detailed assessment of these new technologies, see Appendix A.) Because the SDI is still in the research stage, we will not attempt to evaluate the ultimate effectiveness or final costs of such a system. Instead, we will focus on the potential strengths and vulnerabilities of the technolo gies that it would employ. We will be concentrating in this article on ballistic missile defense, although we emphasize that defense against other nuclear weapons delivery systems, such as manned bombers and cruise missiles, will also need to be addressed if the goal of a truly perfect defense is to be realized.