First-strike Enabling Weapons Systems
- Any missile defense system capable of wide-area (e.g. continental) coverage, and especially those enabling destruction of missiles in the boost phase, are first-strike-enabling weapons. The reason for this is that they allow for a nuclear strike to be launched with reduced fear of mutual assured destruction. Such a system has never been deployed, although a limited continental missile defense capability has been deployed by the U.S., but is only capable of defending against a handful of missiles.
- This does not apply, in general, to terminal missile defense systems, such as the former U.S. Safeguard Program or the Russian A-35/A-135 systems. Limited-area terminal missile defense systems, defending such targets as ICBM fields, or C4ISTAR facilities may, in fact, be stabilizing, because they ensure survivable retaliatory capacity, and/or survivable de-escalation capacity.
- This also might not apply to a "non-discriminatory" space-based missile defense system, even if it is—actually, precisely because it is—of global reach. Such a system would be designed to destroy all weapons launched by any nation in a ballistic trajectory, negating any nation's capability to launch any strike with ballistic missiles, assuming the system was sufficiently robust to repel attacks from all potential threats, and built to open standards openly agreed upon and adhered to. No such system has yet been seriously proposed.
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