Can I make a few points here? As background, I've been working on air defense and missile defense systems for many, many years specifically on the US missile defense system from the mid-1980s through to the early 1990s. Wrapped around that, I've also done a lot of work on strategic nuclear weapons and their use (both the how and the where).
Firstly Grazhdanin Stas is quite right when he says there is no such thing as a limited missile defense system. The reason is that in any such system, the majority of the cost lies in the system, not in the weapons that equip that system. The "system" is called the "Ground Environment" (thus ADGE - Air Defense Ground Environment or MDGE - Missile Defense Ground Environment) and consists of the sensors, missile launchers, command control network, maintenance and support facilities etc. Compared with the cost of the Ground Environment, the actual cost of the missiles is pretty much inconsequential, its about ten percent of the total. Once the Ground Environment is established, adding extra missiles to it is a relatively simple and inexpensive operation. Thus, a "thin" missile screen can become a "thick" missile screen very easily. This was a matter of great concern during the 1970s and 1980s due to US fears that the Soviet Union would stage a "breakout", that is suddenly start to add large numbers of missiles to the Ground Environment established by the missile defense system surrounding Moscow and thus establish a capable defense against US missiles before we could respond. There was a lot of evidence (ambiguous but strategic evidence always is) that the extensions to the Moscow Defense Ground Environment were being built and that a "breakout" was on the cards.
Secondly, meaning no disrespect to anybody, but there appears to be a presumption that only the US is developing a missile defense system and that if US development was stopped, the issue would go away. That is quite simply incorrect. Russia, China, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, India, Israel, France, Germany and the UK are all working on their own missile defense systems quite independently of any US program or any of those country's involvement in the US programs. ABM systems are a fact of strategic life and they're here to stay. In a US context, the discussion of such systems isn't whether such systems should be developed, that's a given, its whether the US should or should not be one of the countries protected by such a system.
Thirdly, there is nothing conceptually or practically difficult about developing an ABM system. Virtually any country with reasonably modern missile technology and access to modern radars can do it. Thus, the list of countries that could develop such systems isn't limited to the list above. As an example, India recently staged a highly successful ballistic missile interception test. There's no reason why Pakistan couldn't do the same. Or Brazil, or Italy. So, ABM is out of the bag and in the world, its not going to go away. It's costly to get the initial system set up but once done, as we've seen, expanding that system from a prototype to a thick system is pretty economic.
Fourthly ABM systems can be very effective. To give you some idea of how much so, when we design a system intended to stop manned bombers, (an ADGE) we considered ourselves as having done very well if we could stop 40 percent of the inbound aircraft - and no air defense system in history has ever shot down more than 20 percent of an inbound air offensive. However, with MDGEs we were able to confidenly predict kill rates in the high 90 percent region
for each layer of the MDS. ICBMs are very easy targets, technically we don't even need an interceptor with a guidance system to hit them. By the way, I note that the old chestnut about swamping the targets with MRVs or MIRVs has come up again. That really doesn't work; we simply shoot the bus down before it discharges its warheads. Contrary to misperceptions, MRVs and MIRVs were not introduced as an anti-ABM precaution, their roots lie elsewhere. In fact MRV and MIRV technology are only viable in the absence of an ABM system; one of the internal logics behind the anti-ABM move in the 1970s was specifically to make MRV and MIRV viable since they were desirable for other reasons.
So, what's going on with Putin and the current kerfuffle?
Another bit of background. When the USSR went splat in 1986-91 it took down most of its strategic forces with it. Some were obsolete and on the verge of dying anyway, some was brand new and needed a lot of money to complete development and deploy, others needed support. Some bits were built in areas that were becoming (or had become) independent. the whole lot just fell apart. Now, truth be told, the USSR (and now Russia) had those strategic forces as its only claim to being a Great Power. The USSR was famously described as being "Upper Volta with rockets" and that's as true today as it was in the 1980s. Economically, politically, Russia is, at best, a regional power of somewhat less significance than France. Only its arsenal of strategic nuclear weapons makes any change to that assessment.
So, when Putin wanted to maintain and assert Russia's status as a Great Power, he had to stabilize and rebuild the country's strategic nuclear forces. Now, we come back to point one. Just like defensive missile systems, offensive missile systems also have a Ground Environment (OMGE - Offensive Missile Ground Environment) and, like defensive systems, the actual weapons are only a tiny proportion of the cost of the system as a whole. (As I always say, think systems, not weapons). Now, the OMGE for a bomber force is its airfields, the OMGE for a sea-based missile force is the SSBNs and the OMGE for a land-based missile force is its silos (plus, in each case, the command and control network that goes with them - relatively inexpensive for bombers, horrendously costly for submarines).
Now, in Russia, the SSBNs were on their last legs, they needed refuelling (not easy or cheap), the hulls were nearly shot and needed replacement. Very expensive. The bomber fleet had atrophied badly and was falling apart, rebuilding it would be expensive. The ICBM fleet was also falling apart, but the Ground Environmentstill existed and could be re-used. Thus, going to a new ICBM solution was apparently the cheapest way of re-establishing the startegic nuclear capability that was Russia's claim to Great Power status. So, Russia invested heavily in rebuilding ICBMs, sticking new ICBMs in old silos was the cheap choice. That's why the first production batches of new missiles went to silos.
Then, horror of horrors, the US (along with a lot of people) started developing ballistic missile defense systems. Worse, the Russian experts took one look at what was coming and saw that they would work and work very well. They knew the ICBM was as obsolete as the battleship of the horse-drawn chariot. Put quite simply, it had been a three-horse race and they'd backed the loser. The US dropped out of the ABM Treaty (a long overdue step, that treaty was fundamentally stupid and should never have been signed in the first place) and that opened up a whole galaxy of options.
The problem with any strategic arms situation like this is that, once one is wrong-footed, its very hard to recover. Russia had made its choice and they were stuck with it. They tried to recover by moving to rail-mobile basing for their ICBMs (very expensive, essentially it combines the worst features of sea-based SLBMs and land-based ICBMs with the advantages of neither - there is a very good reason why the US looked at rail-mobile systems, burst out laughing and hoped the USSR would pick up and copy the idea) and by developing a highly evasive, atmosphere-skimming re-entry vehicle. That has proved extremely expensive and it still doesn't work. Although, if it does work, the new RV will be flying below the intercept envelope of the land-based interceptors, doing so puts it smack into the intercept envelope of ship-based interceptors (fired from AEGIS ships - and there are almost 90 of them). We're pretty happy we can shoot down the new RVs.
Russia's beginning to spend money on more viable systems again. The first of the new SSBNs has just been launched and there are two sisters in production. The Tu-160 bomber is also back in production, rate of build one per year until 2012, probably increasing thereafter, perhaps to three per year. Its not much but its better than nothing. If Russia sticks with ICBMs, nothing is what it will have - and, as Grazhdanin Stas points out, Russia can't afford to be disarmed. Unfortunately, from an American perspective, that's their problem. They picked the wrong horse, they have to live with the consequences.
Anyway, a lot of the Putin affair is bluster aimed at a possibility of eliminating missile defenses (no chance, too many countries have a finger in that pie) and hiding what was a serious strategic error in building the wrong system. Another point is that Putin is very well aware that the European systems being developed will neutralize his short-range ballistic missile fleet so he's hoping that by making a lot of fuss at this point, he'll slow down or stop development of those systems.
A few other points. Mutually Assured Destruction is not and has never been US nuclear policy. Our policy was and is to maintain a secure and effective strike capability against any enemy. Secure means it can't be countered, effective means that we can totally destroy that enemy. To quote one of the NSC papers from the 1950s "America does not wage war on its enemies, it destroys them" (you may recognize that quotation from TBO - very little of the strategic stuff in TBO is fictional).
Technically, a missile defense system allows a country that has both an offensive and a defensive missile fleet to threaten with one while the other makes a counter-attack impossible. That's plausible but it doesn't work that way in reality. In reality, if one country develops a defensive system, others will as well and the situation carries on as normal. With one big exception - missile defense takes ICBMs off the table. To me, that's a very good thing. ICBMs are dangerously destabilizing, they are one-shot, one-chance weapons. Once fired, that's it, a nuclear war has started. They can't be aborted, turned around or re-targeted. Get rid of them and diplomacy has a better chance of stopping that war from happening. It's good to win a war, better to have never fought one.
We weren't "deterred" from launching a first strike on the USSR, we never intended to do so. What we did intend (and did) was to contain the USSR, force them to engage in a strategic arms race that would break their economy and thus ruin the USSR economically. The nuclear posturing was intended to further that aim - and it worked. We broke the USSR economically, we destroyed its military forces not on the battlefield but in the factories and stock exchanges. A nuclear first strike never featured in that plan, the intention was always to make that strike unnecessary. If it hadn't been for the idiocy of the Kennedy/Johnson/Carter era, we could have pulled it off much earlier.
(Are we doing the same thing now? That might be your opinion, I couldn't possibly comment
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