Britain and Ballistic Missile Defence, 1942-2002

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Britain was the first country to come under sustained ballistic missile attack, during 1944-45. Defence against ballistic missiles has been a persistent, if highly variable, subject of political policy and technical investigation ever since. The British Second World War experience of trying to counter the V-2 attacks contained many elements of subsequent responses to ballistic missile threats: an uncertain intelligence picture; the establishment of an early-warning system; a counter-force campaign to destroy rockets on the ground; passive defence measures to ameliorate the effects of missile strikes; and elaborate but untried active defences to intercept missiles in flight. After the war, a reasonably accurate picture of Soviet missile capabilities was not achieved until the early 1960s, by which time the problem of early warning had largely been solved. Early British efforts to develop active defences, however, foundered because of the formidable technical challenges and limited resources, but some defences were established by the Americans and the Soviets. From the mid-1960s on, British attention shifted away from the development of the country's own defences towards the wider context.