If America Ever Tries to Nuke Moscow, Russia Has a Missile 'Shield' That Would Stop It

Kyle Mizokami

Security, Eurasia

Russia has the only capital surrounded by a missile shield.

The most heavily defended city in the world is not Washington, DC. It’s Moscow. While the District of Columbia has legions of Secret Service and Homeland Security police defending it, the Russian capital is the only one in the world—that we know of—defended with nuclear-tipped missiles. It’s all the result of an exception built into a forty-four-year-old arms control treaty.

The 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty was an arms control agreement between the United States and Soviet Union. Unlike other treaties that focused on offensive weapons, the ABM Treaty focused on limiting defensive weapons, missiles designed to knock down incoming nuclear warheads. The theory behind the treaty was that unrestricted ABM missile deployments on both sides would lead to ever-escalating offensive missile arsenals, as each side tried to overcome the other’s ever-growing defenses.

The ABM Treaty didn’t outlaw all ABMs, however: each side was allowed a single ABM site with up to one hundred missiles. It could place them where it wished. The United States decided to place the Safeguard system around Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota, hoping in doing so to shield its most lethal and accurate missiles from surprise attack. Safeguard was only briefly operational before it was dismantled; protecting a single location with an enormously expensive system didn’t make sense.

The Soviet Union, on the other hand, was a highly centralized government with the capital city of Moscow at the center. The destruction of Moscow in a surprise nuclear first strike could cripple the USSR’s ability to respond in kind. The result was the A-35 system, a complete air defense network designed to ensure Moscow’s survival in a nuclear war.

Read full article