I

ICBM

ICBM stands for Intercontinental Ballistic Missile—the immensely powerful,
long-range nuclear weapons systems, against which there is currently no
effective defence, providing, during thecold war, perhaps the most important
element of the nuclear balance between the Soviet Union and the USA. There
is a broad distinction between SLBMs (submarine-launched ballistic missiles,
such as the US Polaris and Trident missiles) and land-based systems. Much of
the effort in theSALTand Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START)
negotiations has involved trying to reduce the number of ICBM systems.
The START treaty signed in July 1991, for example, was to reduce the number
of warheads carried by these missiles, world-wide, by around 30%. However,
bothsuperpowersalready sought lower force levels, principally for economic
reasons, and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union appeared to render
thedeterrencefactor of ICBMs largely redundant, as no other country has a
true ICBM capacity. The issue re-emerged in 2001, however, when US
President George W. Bush announced that the USA would withdraw from
all anti-nuclear treaties, including START, which would preclude the devel-
opment of a system of National Missile Defence (aimed at protecting the USA
against ICBMs, launched either in error or by a hostile state, seeSon of Star
Wars).

Ideology

Ideology is a difficult, but frequently-used, concept in the social sciences, and
one that has endless submeanings in both academic and everyday discussion.
The simplest definition is probably given by a translation of the German word
Weltanschauung, which is often used as though intertranslatable with ‘ideol-
ogy’. This translation would render ‘ideology’ as ‘world-view’, the overall
perception one has of what the world, especially the social world, consists of
and how it works. An ideology, and most students of ideology would want to
say that we all had one, though often without realizing it, is a complete and
self-consistent set of attitudes, moral views, empirical beliefs and even rules of
logical discourse and scientific testing. However, ideologies, which tell us