ABM: An Evaluation of the Decision to Deploy an Antiballistic Missile System

1971 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 796
Author(s):  
Colin S. Gray ◽  
Abram Chayes ◽  
Jerome B. Wiesner ◽  
Johan J. Holst ◽  
William Schneider,
Author(s):  
James Cameron

This book tracks the development of the United States’ first antiballistic missile system from the beginning of the John F. Kennedy administration through its almost total prohibition with the Antiballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, which the United States and Soviet Union signed in May 1972. Historians generally interpret the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks that led to the ABM Treaty as signaling the United States’ acceptance of strategic stability based on mutual assured destruction (MAD) and approximate nuclear parity between the superpowers. The book argues that this is mistaken, because declassified records indicate that Richard Nixon believed that the United States required nuclear superiority to maintain its national security commitments. Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and Nixon all engaged in a double game, in which they attempted to reconcile their personal feelings about the utility of nuclear weapons with the demands of maintaining a façade of strategic coherence to the American public and Congress. Kennedy and Johnson, who were personally far more skeptical than Nixon regarding the merits of nuclear superiority, were forced to adopt a public posture that emphasized its importance, because that was the prevailing public and congressional sentiment at the time. This only changed when the Vietnam War precipitated a collapse in the American domestic consensus behind superiority in 1969, forcing President Nixon to sign strategic arms limitation agreements, the philosophy behind which he profoundly opposed. The book thereby places domestic politics at the center of the formulation of US nuclear strategy.


Physics Today ◽  
1969 ◽  
Vol 22 (7) ◽  
pp. 99-103
Author(s):  
Peter Franken

Author(s):  
V. V. Belov ◽  
◽  
N. N Vlasov ◽  
D. A. Vodichenkov ◽  
◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Min-Guk Seo ◽  
Min-Jea Tahk

This paper deals with the closed-loop form of mid-course guidance law design for accelerating missile system, whose acceleration is approximately constant. A midcourse guidance algorithm of feedback form is proposed to satisfy the engagement geometry conditions at the burn-out time for terminal homing performance enhancement. The effect of velocity change due to missile acceleration is explicitly considered in the derivation of the guidance law. The terminal constraint update algorithm is proposed under the assumption that the target trajectory is predicted precisely. Simulation results are provided to show the performance and characteristics of the proposed algorithm.


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