Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars)
Reagan announced a plan in March 1983 to make nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete, and the physics never worked. The Strategic Defense Initiative was proposed in a televised address without consulting the joint chiefs, the state department or the allies in any detail, and it proposed a layered defence against ballistic missiles using space-based lasers, particle beams and kinetic interceptors. The press called it Star Wars within a day, which Reagan disliked and could not shake off. The technical objections were immediate and never answered. Intercepting thousands of warheads travelling at seven kilometres a second, among decoys, in the minutes available, requires a system that works first time at close to a hundred per cent, and no component of it existed. The strategic objection was more interesting. Mutual assured destruction rested on both sides being vulnerable, and a defence that worked — or that the other side feared might work — makes a first strike thinkable, which is why the 1972 treaty limited defences in the first place. The Soviet response is the part that mattered. Moscow took it seriously, could not afford to match it, and Gorbachev spent the Reykjavik summit of 1986 trying to trade deep cuts for confining it to the laboratory; Reagan refused, and the meeting broke up. Whether that pressure hastened the Soviet collapse is argued both ways. Some 30 billion dollars were spent by 1993, and the programme continues in reduced form as a limited defence against small attacks. The speech's most interesting feature is that Reagan appears to have meant it literally. He had a long-standing horror of nuclear weapons that his own officials found inconvenient, and offered more than once to share the technology with Moscow, which nobody in either government believed.
- Year: 1983 CE
- Category: Political
