History of Strategic Air and Ballistic Missile Defense: Volume II (1956-1972)

This is the second of two draft volumes on the history of strategic air and ballistic missile defense from 1945 to 1972. It covers the 1955–1972 portion of the larger period, and is organized into five interrelated and progressively more detailed chapters. Chapter I provides a comparison of U.S. and Soviet strategies, Chapters II and III deal with U.S. strategy and Soviet strategy, while Chapters IV and V cover U.S. systems and Soviet systems. This Executive Summary is drawn directly from, and highlights critical judgments of, these five chapters. As such, it outlines the substance of the much larger body of primary evidence contained in the separate books in this draft volume which was gathered to address the reasons underlying policy formulation and decision making for strategic defense and the relationship between the superpowers within that highly complex security policy arena. Results of research concerning factors influencing attitudes of policy/decision makers at critical times appear in Chapters II and III. This Executive Summary has three major groupings: one, to reflect the contextual setting of decision- making, circa 1955; the second, to highlight strategic air defense policy comparisons and contrasts, 1955–1972; and a third, to present judgments and conclusions about the results of the play of factors and perceptions which molded air defense decisions during these years. These three sections derive from and are firmly tied to an evidential base; however, time and documentation constraints have limited the effort to develop that base. Consequently, important elements of the story may appear to be slighted. The essential and significant, however, are here. Central questions faced the U.S. and Soviet defense planners. Fundamentally they asked: “How to defend the country?” and “How may we be attacked?”