Ensuring Strategic Stability in the Past and Present:

of the military forces of the U.S. and USSR. According to Halperin, “we came to an inevitableconclusion that none of the existing American strategic programs could give us the predominancethat we had in the 1950s.” Based on the Halperin group’s report, Henry Kissinger—who used towork with Halperin at Harvard, and who became the national security advisor to the presidentof the United States in 1969—came to the conclusion that strategic predominance of the UnitedStates over the USSR was unattainable, at least in the 1970s. Kissinger shared this opinion withPresident Richard Nixon, who agreed with that conclusion (based on the data and estimatesprovided by other sources, and on his growing confidence in Kissinger’s thoroughness, logic andacademic gravitas).It should be recalled that at that time Kissinger developed and introduced the Five Polar PowerWorld formula (U.S., USSR, China, Western Europe and Japan), which was supported by PresidentNixon. This formula played an important role: it helped the United States to come out ofthe deepest foreign policy and political-military crisis of that period, and to conclude a series oftreaties between the United States and the USSR. It also ensured a breakthrough in U.S.-Sino relations,which made the U.S. defeat in Vietnam less painful.In 1972, five years after the U.S.-USSR Glassboro Summit, President Nixon and General Secretaryof the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) Leonid Brezhnevmet in Moscow and signed the ABM Treaty together with an Interim Agreement on CertainMeasures with Respect to the Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms. The ABM Treaty Protocol,which was signed in 1974, provided for further limitation of the parties’ activities in this area.The political and military significance of the ABM Treaty was enormous. It became a textbookexample of thorough elaboration on a large variety of military, technical and legal issues. Based onstrict observance of the principle of equality and equal security of the parties, the treaty imposedsignificant and strict limitations with respect to the quantity, structure of certain components,qualitative characteristics and deployment of the missile defense (MD) systems of the USSR andthe United States. It prohibited the development, testing or deployment of other kinds and typesof MD systems, whether sea-based, air-based, space-based or mobile land-based, along with thedevelopment of MD systems covering the entire territory of the country or their deploymentbeyond the national territories of the two countries. For more than a decade, these limitations actuallyblocked the build-up and modernization of arms in this area; however, these limitations didnot prohibit the development of a number of technical projects in laboratories and design centers.In accordance with the ABM Treaty, each party was allowed to deploy its MD systems or theircomponents only in two areas with a radius of 150 km. At each deployment site there could be nomore than 100 interceptor missiles and 100 launchers.The treaty also stipulated quantitative and qualitative limitations with respect to ABM radars ateach of the two aforementioned sites. It was prohibited to develop, test or deploy ABM launchersdesigned to launch more than one ABM interceptor missile at a time from each launcher; to equipmissiles, launchers, or radars, other than ABM interceptor missiles, ABM launchers, or ABM radars,with the capability of countering strategic ballistic missiles or their elements in flight trajectory,or to test them in an ABM mode; or to deploy radars for early warning of strategic ballisticmissile attack, except along the periphery of the national territory and oriented outward from thatterritory.14Ensuring Strategic Stability in the Past and Present: Theoretical and Applied Questions