Star Wars
Since the beginning of the Cold War, American society and culture have been affected by the desire to defend the nation against nuclear holocaust. Billions of dollars have been spent on researching, developing, and deploying a defense against missile attacks from the former Soviet Union and more recently from smaller states that have developed nuclear weapons.
The term Star Wars, coined by opponents of President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), came to be widely used to describe the system of space-based weapons intended to protect the United States from intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM).
The United States first began missile defense research during World War II in response to Germany's rocket program, which included plans for ICBMs. One of the earliest proponents of missile defense was Edward Teller, who authored a report on the feasibility of defensive capabilities against atomic weapons for the U.S. Navy in 1945. Teller, a lifelong optimist about the possibilities for a defense against ICBMs, invited Ronald Reagan to visit him at the weapons laboratory in Livermore just after Reagan was elected governor of California in 1966. Reagan accepted, and Teller's two-hour briefing on the possibilities of missile defense left a lasting impression on Reagan.
In 1967, in response to the Soviet deployment of a missile defense system, President Lyndon Johnson ordered the deployment of a U.S. version called Sentinel, intended to protect U.S. cities. The program was later renamed Safeguard and refocused to defend strategic weapons systems. In 1972, as part of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, known as SALT, the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty was signed by the United States and the Soviet Union. It limited the two countries to two missile defense sites, each with up to 100 interceptors, which was reduced to one site through a follow-up protocol in 1974.
In 1982, Teller gave a short presentation on strategic defense to President Reagan and the following year Teller, working with the White House Science Council, produced a report that formed the basis for Reagan's proposal to Congress in 1983. Originally, SDI was envisioned as a system of lasers and space-based interceptors (SBI). The SBI were large, garage-like satellites housing guidance systems and containing ten hit-to-kill interceptors known as smart rocks. This reliance on futuristic technology led to the system being called Star Wars, after the popular 1977 science fiction movie. Critics argued that the system was too expensive and provided easy targets for Soviet antisatellite weapons. In response, the system was redesigned to use miniaturized sensors and computers to give the individual interceptors the ability to operate independent of the satellites. Because the interceptors were smaller, they were called brilliant pebbles.
The demise of the Soviet Union and the success of U.S. Patriot missiles against Scud missiles in the first Gulf War led President George H. W. Bush to reorient
President Ronald Reagan addressing the nation on March 23, 1983, to announce the Strategic Defense Initiative, an attempt to develop a shield to defend against incoming nuclear missiles. © BETTMANN/CORBISSDI toward the development of a ground-launched interceptor system known as Global Protection against Limited Strikes (GPALS). Although the research and development on such a system would not violate the ABM treaty, the deployment would. A decade later, in 2002, President George W. Bush ordered the deployment of a modest National Missile Defense (NMD), called Son of Star Wars by its detractors, and later that year the United States withdrew from the ABM Treaty.
A Department of Defense report estimated that from 1984 to 1994 SDI-related expenses amounted to $32.6 billion, but a Congressional Research Service report put the number at over $70 billion. Bush's 2005 budget provided over $10 billion in funding for NMD, but some analysts put the total cost for deployment at around $100 billion.
Reagan, Ronald; Triumphalism.
Bibliography
Baucom, Donald R. The Origins of SDI, 1944–1983. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992.
Denoon, David B. Ballistic Missile Defense in the Post-Cold War Era. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1995.
Duric, Mira. The Strategic Defense Initiative: U.S. Policy and the Soviet Union. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003.
FitzGerald, Frances. Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000.
Holms, Hans-Henrik. "Star Wars." Journal of Peace Research 23 (1986): 1–8.
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