In Defense of the Strategic Defense Initiative
The following is a tongue in cheek defense of Reagan’s famous “Star Wars” missile program, which I wrote as my final paper in high school US history.
The end of the Second World War in August 1945 marked the beginning of a new era in warfare. In the past, each new advance in offensive technology had been countered with a corresponding breakthrough in defensive technology. However, the atomic bomb was different. Its power was so great that no conceivable system could defend against its devastating effects.
As a result, the atomic bomb necessitated a revolutionary new military defense policy: mutually assured destruction (MAD). This doctrine provided national security to the superpowers of the postwar era, the United States and the Soviet Union, by ensuring that any attack on a rival would result in total annihilation for everyone. Although it was not an ideal solution, MAD was effective, and it remained the basis of both U.S. and Soviet military policy for decades.
In March 1983, however, U.S. President Ronald Reagan offered an alternative in a televised speech: “Let me share with you a vision of the future which offers hope. It is that we embark on a program to counter the awesome Soviet missile threat with measures that are defensive.” Reagan’s grand idea became known as the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). It promised to completely change the game, potentially eliminating the need for MAD altogether. Reagan argued that, as scientific understanding had improved considerably since the 1940s, it would be possible to develop new technologies that could counter the threat of nuclear weapons.
Yet, while the initiative’s utopian vision was a reassuring thought, the project was scientifically ludicrous. Perhaps the famous physicist Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky summed it up best in a 1985 Physics Today editorial: “There is no new technology on the horizon that realistically makes the President’s speech anything but an expression of hope” [1]. Indeed, even the chief scientist of the SDI, Gerold Yonas, admitted in 1986 that his research group had been given the incredibly vague and long-term task of “initiat[ing] creative approaches that, although perhaps unavailable today or even in the near future, could someday provide entirely new and effective technological options…” [2]. The vast majority of the scientific community lambasted the SDI as an impossible fantasy with 1980s technology.
So, why exactly did the U.S. government spend billions on a project doomed to fail from the beginning? And why would Reagan lie to the public about the rate of improvement of military technology, among other things?
To answer these questions, it is necessary to examine the Cold War from a political science perspective. As it turns out, the U.S. was playing a much deeper game than it appeared on the surface. The SDI was a calculated bluff made by the U.S. government in order to incite an arms race which would expedite the decline of the Soviet Union, as can be seen through retrospective political analysis.
The primary way in which it becomes clear that the U.S. objective in establishing the SDI was to start an arms race is by examining Reagan-era foreign policy. In contrast to his predecessors, Reagan’s initial rhetoric toward the U.S.S.R. was openly hostile. Reagan believed that the Soviet Union’s great military strength represented a direct threat to the U.S., which culminated in his designation of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” a mere three weeks before he announced the SDI [3]. He frequently spoke about the decline of the U.S. military, and even said that he believed the U.S. was militarily inferior to the Soviet Union [4].
It may seem strange that a U.S. President would ostensibly goad the Soviet Union into launching an attack, but in hindsight, Reagan’s vitriol was actually an excellent strategic decision. Reagan’s speeches and policies had the intended effect: the U.S.S.R., which was already struggling economically, poured more and more of its resources into its military [5]. For example, the announcement of the SDI caused the Soviets to start their own rival program [3].
Of course, the Soviet Union recognized that it was being manipulated. Mikhail Gorbachev, the politician who led the Soviet Union during its final years, expressed his concerns to Reagan about the SDI “moving the arms race into a new stage and into a new medium” at the 1986 Reykjavík Conference [6]. And yet, what could Gorbachev do? If the Soviet Union did not take the SDI seriously, there was potential for an American nuclear strike on its own soil, and that was an unacceptable risk to take.
Therein lies the brilliance of the SDI. It didn’t matter that from a scientific standpoint, the SDI was an impossibility. It is clear that Reagan’s claim in his 1983 speech that “current technology has attained a level of sophistication where it’s reasonable for us to begin [the SDI]” was patently false [7]. Similarly, his assertion in the same speech that American missiles had grown “increasingly obsolete” while the Soviet missiles had recently become “much more powerful and accurate” was hyperbolic, if not an outright fabrication [7]. Rather, Reagan’s true goal in establishing the SDI was to provoke a Soviet economy teetering on the edge of collapse.
One reasonable objection to the theory laid out thus far is to ask why so many different scientists would work on a program like the SDI. Surely, it cannot be the case that the SDI was completely impractical, or else it would be quickly abandoned.
For instance, the physicist Edward Teller, who was one of the key scientists responsible for the development of the hydrogen bomb, was highly optimistic about the practicality of energy weapon technologies. Teller argued that energy weapons had the potential to be the third great military invention of the atomic era, after atomic and hydrogen bombs, and that their capabilities could extend to defensive purposes [3]. In addition, the White House Science Advisor during the Reagan administration, George Keyworth, stated of the SDI: “…the answer, to the best of my judgment, is yes. It is technically feasible” [8].
However, both of these arguments hold little water. Regarding Teller, it seems that he was overly optimistic about the timeframe for directed-energy weapons. While promising, they are still in the experimental phases of research as of 2017 [9]. Meanwhile, Keyworth was an official in the Reagan administration, giving him an incentive to stretch the truth just as Reagan did. Thus, his testimony cannot be trusted.
Of course, there were other scientists besides Keyworth and Teller who believed in various aspects of the SDI, but as Gerold Yonas wrote, they all “shared a great deal of intellectual skepticism” about the project as a whole [2]. It is clear that almost no scientists believed in what they were doing, but continued to participate in the project anyway.
Thus, the United States never actually intended for the SDI to work successfully; rather, it was a strategic gambit made by the Reagan administration in order to further weaken the ailing Soviet Union. The natural question becomes, then: did it work?
Looking back from the twenty-first century, the answer appears to be a resounding yes. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and one of the primary reasons was the indulgent Soviet military budget. In that sense, the SDI worked perfectly, even if it was a complete failure scientifically. Paradoxically, this makes the SDI both one of the most successful and least successful policies of the Cold War era.
However, it’s doubtful that the same trick will work again in the future. With the Soviet Union gone, the U.S. now faces a different rival that it has only begun to take seriously in the past few years: China. This time, the U.S. cannot lean on its opponent economically, because in this arena, China will likely have the advantage. It will therefore be up to the U.S. to reach back into its bag of tricks and hope that it can once again come up with a policy as deceivingly clever as the SDI.
References
[1] W. K. H. Panofsky, “The Strategic Defense Initiative: Perception vs Reality,” Physics Today, June 1985. Link
[2] G. Yonas, “The Strategic Defense Initiative,” Daedalus, vol. 114, no. 2, 1985, pp. 73–90. JSTOR
[3] “Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI),” Atomic Heritage Foundation, July 2018. Link
[4] B. A. Fischer, “Toeing the Hardline? The Reagan Administration and the Ending of the Cold War,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 112, no. 3, 1997, pp. 477–496. JSTOR
[5] T. Watkins, “The Economic Collapse of the Soviet Union,” San José State University. Link
[6] Reykjavík Summit Transcript, U.S. Department of State, October 11, 1986. PDF
[7] R. Reagan, “Address to the Nation on Defense and National Security,” March 23, 1983. Link
[8] G. Keyworth, interview with Richard Rhodes, American Institute of Physics, July 21, 1983.
[9] J. Hecht, “Laser Weapons Not Yet Ready for Missile Defense,” IEEE Spectrum, September 2017. Link