Defence Systems

I

Introduction

Defence Systems, strategic defence of a country against a foreign military attack.

II

Nuclear Strategies

During the 20th century the concept of strategic defence was revolutionized by new weapons of mass destruction, especially by intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) equipped with nuclear warheads. Able to strike at one country from the heart of another and effectively invulnerable in the course of their journey to their target, these weapons rendered traditional defences obsolete. No longer was it enough to maintain fortified borders, or, in Britain’s case, rely on command of the seas surrounding its island shores. Instead, a new strategy evolved in the period following World War II. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was set up soon after World War II to lock United States forces into the defence of Europe.

Effectively, strategists were forced to admit that there was no defence against an attack by nuclear missiles. Enough devastating warheads were certain to get through to ensure economic and political disaster as well as an appalling toll of civilian casualties. This belief underlies every country’s strategic defences today—apart from the United States’ involvement with the technologically revolutionary Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI; dubbed “Star Wars”) defence umbrella begun during the Reagan administration of the 1980s.

Deterrence depends on an effective nuclear delivery force and on the protection of that force from a first-strike attack. The superpowers’ nuclear delivery forces currently consist of a triad of three weapons systems: long-range bombers with nuclear air-to-surface missiles; ICBMs based in silos buried in the plains of the central United States and Russia; and SLBMs launched from nuclear-powered submarines. The defence of this force is more complex and consists almost entirely of passive defence systems designed to provide early warning of a missile strike, as well as to protect missiles by concealing them on submarines, dispersing them on mobile launchers, or fortifying them in underground silos.

Until the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, the Kremlin’s strategy was to nullify US second-strike power by developing ICBMs that were theoretically capable of destroying US missiles in their silos; by maintaining a large, active air defence system against conventional bombers; and by building a vast anti-submarine naval force. After 1991 some of these weapons and systems were destroyed or deactivated, but others came under the control of the Commonwealth of Independent States or of individual republics, particularly Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan.

A

Retaliation Strategies

Active defence against nuclear-armed ballistic missiles was largely discarded in favour of the threat of retaliation. The strategic posture adopted by both superpowers (the former Soviet Union and the United States) was to ensure that the enemy believed that, even if it launched a first wave of missiles in a surprise attack, enough of the defending power’s own weapons would survive to cause unacceptable levels of damage in a return strike.

The intricacies of nuclear strategy have varied throughout the years since August 1945, when atomic bombs were dropped by the United States on Japan. Should missiles be targeted at cities or at other missiles? Should missiles be launched on the first evidence of an enemy strike or when the first bombs land? These questions aside, strategic defence has been essentially about a state’s ability to deliver a knock-out blow even after receiving one itself.

The superpowers have been the prime shapers of the nuclear balance of terror. America’s nuclear forces extended over Europe throughout the 1950s and 1960s. If the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) launched nuclear weapons in Europe, the United States would react as though the American homeland had been attacked.

B

Limited Nuclear War

As nuclear weapons became smaller and more accurate, strategists of the 1970s and early 1980s began to contemplate the possibility of fighting—and winning—a so-called limited nuclear war in Europe. This return to the concept of a buffer zone between the superpowers in which a conflict could be played out with minimum damage to their own territories predictably aroused concern in the European target zone.

Anti-nuclear movements in Britain (notably the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) and Germany campaigned vigorously in the 1980s against the introduction of short-range nuclear weapons in Europe. Arms control treaties, such as the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty, limited, and eventually eliminated, such weapons from Europe; the second Strategic Arms Reduction Talks Treaty (START II), which was abandoned in 2002, also attempted to address the issue.