was never ratified by the United States Senate. The Soviet Union ultimately complied with its terms anyway, decommissioning its FOBS in 1983 (see the 'End of deployment and associated reasons' section). The agreement also stipulated that 12 of the 18 Soviet FOBS launchers in Kazakhstan were to be taken apart or demolished and never replaced. This was meant to happen within an eight month period following the treaty's ratification. The terms allowed the USSR to modify the six remaining launchers to fit missile modernization testing purposes. American view The U.S. considered creating orbital bombardment weapons in the early 1960s, but concluded in 1963 that they offered few advantages over the ICBM. So when the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) began in 1962 to suspect that the Soviet Union would develop a FOBS-like system, they concluded that Moscow sought the weapon for "propaganda or political reasons", not any militarily significant capacity. The Soviet Union's R-36O test launches in 1966 and 1967 persuaded the CIA that Moscow was more serious about the military applications (though even through October 1968, around a month before the R-36O was declared operational by the USSR, it remained unclear to the CIA whether the tests they had observed involved a FOBS or a "depressed trajectory" ICBM). At a news conference on November 3, 1967, Defense Secretary McNamara announced that the Soviet Union might be creating a FOBS . This was the first time that the FOBS project had been explicitly referred to in public (though Khrushchev alluded to this kind of weapon in the early 1960s). McNamara emphasized that the potential Soviet FOBS did not worry him in consideration of its disadvantages compared to the ICBM. At a subsequent congressional hearing, John S. Foster Jr., Director of Defense Research and Engineering, said that the U.S. had since 1963 been developing "over-the-horizon" radar networks that could give about 30 minutes' warning of a FOBS strike, and that such funding would continue. The U.S.' view that the FOBS was not particularly useful militarily may explain why the Soviet FOBS was defended by McNamara and others as legal under the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. U.S. officials may not have been willing to see the treaty break down over a single issue like the FOBS, especially given that they had already evaluated it as a minor threat in the grand scheme of that period's nuclear weapon landscape. Recent developments In