Kennedy and Reagan by Scott Farris

Author:Scott Farris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2013-11-05T05:00:00+00:00

Reagan would receive a similar response from the Soviets twenty-five years later when he proposed the Soviets work with the United States to codevelop Reagan’s proposed Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a project derided by critics as “Star Wars,” after the space fantasy film series of that name, but which Reagan considered to be every bit as noble a mission as Project Apollo or perhaps more so, because Reagan hoped SDI would end the possibility of nuclear war.

Defense was one area where Reagan unhesitatingly was willing to spend billions of new dollars and to organize all the government’s collective will, skills, and efforts. SDI was also, like Kennedy’s moon challenge, an instance where Reagan alone initiated the effort. He had first discussed the concept of a missile defense system in an otherwise routine speech on defense spending on March 23, 1983. As with Kennedy’s moon challenge, it caught almost everyone off-guard; Reagan had not even bothered to clear the idea with the Pentagon, even though his proposal would reverse three decades of official U.S. nuclear policy.

The idea then disappeared from public discussion for two years until March 1985, when Reagan requested $25 billion in new funding over five years to begin development of a global missile shield. The technology to be used was unspecified, but the experts tasked with developing the project talked about a “multi-tiered system” that would use some combination of lasers, heat-seeking missiles, and other technologies, some of which were nowhere near reality yet.

Oddly, though such a system would require significant leaps forward in technology, it was widely assumed at home and abroad that the United States was capable of developing such a system. Polls found two-thirds of Americans believed American scientists were capable of developing such a defense system, and up to two-thirds of Americans supported development of SDI—if it was foolproof.

The immediate debate after Reagan proposed SDI was about how he had gotten the idea in the first place. One story told by an aide said Reagan had been stunned to learn during a tour of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) in 1979 that the United States had no missile defense system, but such a story makes Reagan sound remarkably ill-informed, which seems unlikely. The debate over the development of antiballistic missiles had been huge news in the 1960s while Reagan was governor. There was also a group of conservative activists, led by Wyoming senator Malcolm Wallop, that in the summer of 1979 began promoting the concept and urging candidate Reagan to advocate a space-based missile defense shield.* Another theory was that SDI was one of the ideas Reagan supposedly got from a movie, either Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain or a movie in which Reagan himself had starred, playing a Secret Service agent who protected an invention called the “Inertia Projector.”

* The author worked for Senator Wallop in 1979–1980 as a junior press aide.

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