Senate locks in the ABM Treaty, capping missile defenses at two sites each

By the summer of 1972, both superpowers held enough warheads to level each other's cities many times over, and each was racing to build defenses that might let it strike first and survive the reply. On August 3, the U.S. Senate ratified the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, signed by Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev at the Moscow Summit that May. The treaty capped each side at two ABM complexes, one guarding the capital and one guarding an ICBM field, with no more than 100 interceptor missiles apiece. It held for thirty years…