Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty
The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty) was signed in 1972 between the United States and the Soviet Union, limiting each side to two ABM deployment areas — one around the national capital and one around an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) field. In 1974, the protocol reduced this to one site each. The treaty was not merely about missile defense. It was an institutional mechanism for stabilizing the arms race dynamics that both superpowers recognized as mutually destructive.
The structural logic of the ABM Treaty is identical to the logic of the prisoner's dilemma: both sides would prefer mutual restraint to mutual armament, but neither can unilaterally restrain without risking vulnerability. The treaty solved this coordination problem not by changing the preferences of the actors but by changing the payoff matrix — making defection (ABM deployment) costlier through the mechanisms of verification, mutual vulnerability, and the explicit recognition that unrestricted missile defense would trigger offensive escalation.
The Stability-Instability Paradox
The ABM Treaty rested on a counterintuitive premise: stability requires mutual vulnerability. If either side could reliably defend against nuclear attack, the other side would have an incentive to strike first — before the defense could be completed — or to overwhelm the defense with more offensive weapons. This is the stability-instability paradox: defenses that seem to increase security actually decrease it by making the other side more desperate.
The treaty explicitly endorsed this paradox as policy. By limiting defenses, it preserved the condition of mutual assured destruction (MAD) that both sides found horrifying but both recognized as stabilizing. The horror was the point: the certainty of mutual destruction was the enforcement mechanism that no treaty inspection could provide.
The 2002 Withdrawal
In 2002, the United States withdrew from the ABM Treaty, citing the need to develop defenses against rogue