The Strategic Defense Initiative, 1983

From Deborah Hart Strober and Gerald S. Strober. Reagan, the Man and His Presidency. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998. 234-235, 243-245.

The Strategic Defense Initiative

John Abrahamson The policy basis for SDI was fairly straightforward: if you can defend against ballistic missiles, and if you can demonstrate that that defense will eventually build up to be very, very effective, then the value of offensive ballistic missiles to the other side would go down. If the value goes down, they ought to be willing to trade them away, or to negotiate limits. . . .

The concept was a multiple layer system, so that when they fired their missiles in large volleys--and with all kinds of gear and techniques to hide the missile warheads and to cause confusion--you had to have layers of defense. And as the missiles or the warheads went to the first layer, you might get 50 percent of them. Then, as it went to the second layer, you might get 50 percent of what's left. And when it goes to the third and fourth layers, you get chunks of that.

So they would be faced with different techniques involved in each layer that they had to build countermeasures against, finding ways to penetrate all these multiple layers. The last layer, of course, was the old concept of "terminal defense," that is, around the key cities and target area you would have ground-based missiles that would fire up and get the few incoming ones remaining. . . .

Was SDI Feasible?

Richard Perle [The feasibility of the Strategic Defense Initiative] depends on what is meant by SDI. The president's concept--or what became known as the president's concept--of a hermetic shield was never technically feasible, and certainly wasn't affordable, even if you could imagine the technology that could put it together.

But it wasn't necessary to imagine the perfect defense in order to believe that SDI was exactly the right thing to do, for several reasons. First, if we didn't make a start on developing the technology, it was clear that we were never going to have it, and the Russians were working on it, and it was impossible to tell, without making the effort, what could or could not be done. Secondly, the mere prospect that we might be developing ballistic missile defense had such profound, and then troubling, consequences for the Kremlin that it would have been worth doing even if it evolved into a charade. . . .

Colin L. Powell We thought it had operational viability; that's what we were trying to find out. As Weinberger always testified, "We are not coming to you [the Congress] to put something up until we have something that will go up and actually work. So what we're asking your support for is to pursue the research, because we think we can do it."

The opponents of SDI did not want us to aggressively pursue the research because, Lord forbid, we might be able to do it, in which case all of their thinking about mutual assured destruction would be down the tubes.

Reagan, in my judgement, was in a slightly different world. He had his inherent belief in the power of American technology to do what it says it can do, almost a "We will go to the moon in ten years" kind of thing. But beyond that, he believed, with all his heart, that nuclear weapons were terrible, that nuclear war was unthinkable, and that we had locked and loaded for forty years to destroy each other with nuclear war in times of crisis.

He believed that we had to change that paradigm, and he believed with all his heart in the shield approach--that is, "Let's get rid of our big guns, because we both have shields to defend us." And what could be wrong with having a shield? Shields don't attack anybody; they defend from somebody. . . .

David Abshire It really didn't make a difference whether this thing would work exactly as Reagan envisioned it. It probably wouldn't, but it was the final blow in the cold war.

We know that the Soviets felt threatened by the strategic initiative, and also, on the tactical initiative, [that] they felt they would lose conventional superiority by the midnineties. And Gorbachev was smart enough to turn around. So Reagan--who was belittled in Europe because of the SDI and because he rattled the boat--rattled the boat that helped bring this thing to a conclusion.