Sdi and U.s. Foreign Policy by Robert W. Tucker

Author:Robert W. Tucker [Tucker, Robert W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780813304687
Google: J2GlDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 5074489
Publisher: Westview Press
Published: 1987-02-18T00:00:00+00:00

European Responses to SDI

The intensification of NATO's nuclear dilemma, aggravated by the developments in U.S.-allied relations just outlined, made it certain that any major change in NATO's military posture and strategy initiated by the United States would activate all the strategic anxieties, diplomatic concerns, and transatlantic tensions that the dilemma chronically generates. The substance, method, and timing of President Reagan's enunciation of SDI in March 1983 guaranteed that this program would be extremely disturbing to allied governments.

Proclaimed without previous consultation with (as opposed to notification of) the allies, defined as a program intended to abolish nuclear deterrence, and justified on the highest grounds of morality and international security, SDI burst into public attention as an extraordinarily large research program designed to transform the military foundation of Western security. The presented instrument of transformation was antinuclear shields for both East and West, which would render nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete" and enable mutual deterrence to depend on the protection of national populations from nuclear strikes instead of on the vulnerability of national populations to nuclear retaliatory destruction. And this proposed strategic transformation, with its implied denigration of nuclear deterrence, was presented to Europe in the midst of the NATO-wide effort, in the face of intense domestic opposition, to deploy intermediate-range missiles on European soil in order to assure the coupling of U.S. strategic nuclear forces to the defense of Europe.

The initial shock with which allied governments reacted to President Reagan's announcement, however, was followed by more complex reactions as the SDI program was shaped by the diverse forces of technological developments, defense budgets, the arms-control dialogue, domestic politics, and prospects of industrial-technological spinoffs. Several conditions have suppressed the initial shock caused by Reagan's announcement, muted official opposition to SDI in Western Europe, and prevented SDI from becoming a focus of popular protest: (1) the abstract and remote quality of SDI's ultimate goal, (2) the prospect that this goal will become practically irrelevant as technological and economic difficulties mount and Reagan leaves the presidency, (3) the fact that SDI is still only a research program, (4) the tendency of different groups and individuals engaged in this program to emphasize a variety of objectives short of creating population shields, (5) the fact that the United States swears adherence to the ABM treaty while it seeks agreed reductions of nuclear strike weapons, including the medium-range missiles in Europe, and (6) official U.S. assurances (as in the Reagan-Thatcher accords) that SDI aims to stabilize a strategic balance, not to achieve strategic superiority, and that the United States will not deploy defensive weapons beyond the ABM treaty restrictions without consulting its allies and negotiating with the Soviets. Moreover, unlike INF, SDI remains largely the concern of governments and experts because it is, for the time being, a set of esoteric technical issues and complicated, hypothetical, strategic, political, and economic issues, which offers a variety of out-puts to support but nothing visible to demonstrate against.

Nevertheless, just as the initial European shock in response to the announcement of

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