Maybe you're right, but it seems to me that if ABM can blunt a first strike, then it should certainly make a retaliatory strike by a confused and crippled responder almost totally ineffective. And regardless of what you think, it's what the other guy thinks that matters. The only way to find out for certain is to try it, of course, but who knows how the equations would change if one side, or even both were equipped thusly.?

Not only is the pattern unclear, but who knows how someone would react in the heat of action? With MAD, people had been living and planning for it for decades, the concept was familiar and the strategies well thought out. The defender might have very few resources left for retaliation, but all he would have to have was the capability of a few near misses on some cities to discourage his opponent. Any threatened degradation of that capability, particularly for the weaker combatant, might provoke him into striking first.

It's enough to say that when the Russians introduced the concept, we wanted no part of it. When we brought it up, they felt the same way. I understand that Star Wars had a political side to it, to try to provoke the Soviets into an arms race that would bankrupt them. Well, it worked, but it was in my opinion, taking a big gamble. It won't work with the Chinese, they took notes and have that Art of War dude on their side.

You also have to look at it from the Soviet's point of view. Star Wars wasn't the only technology that scared them shitless, MIRVs, especially on submarine-launched missliles, highly accurate silo busters, and dropping Peacekeepers in flimsy, obsolete silos were all obviously first-strike-friendly options. Our backup retaliatory system, the rockets-on- rails plan, was never built at all. It seemed to me that we were going for a first strike capability and I wasn't Russian. We were also developing the technology to defeat some other Soviet systems that were certainly only retaliatory in nature, they were useless for first strikes.

The final straw came when I heard a proposal come out of the Pentagon that we were considering using Trident warheads to clear a path through Soviet air defenses for our bombers. To use our most secure backup retaliation weapon to knock out antiaircraft installations (a lunatic strategy anyway, why not just hit the bomber's targets instead) only makes sense in a first strike scenario. The Russkis must have thought we'd gone crazy.

I knew we weren't planning a first strike, that most of the items I mentioned above were either an attempt to cut all the armed services and all the defense contractors into a variety of new missions of questionable value, it was just pork barrel. But to the Russians, it looked like we meant business. Especially since Hermann Kahn was our leading nuclear theorist at the time. That man was crazier than a bedbug. His idea was to have a completely flexible strategy capable of fighting any kind of nuclear war we wanted, so as to prevent the Russians from planning for any kind of war in particular, and to select the type of war they weren't ready for. I read his books while adopting the mind-set a Russian might have who had been trained in the evil and treachery of the Americans since adolescence. There was nothing in there likely to make him change his mind about us.

I've been a student of these issues since high school, and I worked in the industry for eight years, with clearances, right up to the end of the Cold War. I think the Russians showed great restraint; not out of goodness, but out of fear.