STRATEGIC DEFENSE INITIATIVE

STRATEGIC DEFENSE INITIATIVE (SDI), also known as Star Wars, was a research project to create a missile defense system that would protect the United States from nuclear attack. Begun by the administration of Ronald Reagan, few military programs have been the subject of more intense, even emotional, debate than have SDI and its successors.

By the late 1960s, the primary means that the United States and the Soviet Union had of directly attacking the other was with nuclear weapons delivered by intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Despite experimentation by both sides with nuclear-tipped defensive missiles, the difficulties of "hitting a bullet with a bullet" proved immense and military planners concluded that any prospective missile defense could be easily overwhelmed. In 1972 the two countries agreed in the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty to build no more than two defensive missile sites each, a number reduced to one in 1974. When Congress shut down the sole U.S. missile defense base in 1976 only months after it had become operational, strategic defense appeared to have been abandoned by the United States for good.

Research quietly continued within the U.S. Army, however, now with an eye toward creating interceptor missiles that would not require nuclear warheads of their own. Partially as a result of the deployment of a new generation of Soviet ICBMs, by the early 1980s U.S. military leaders were growing increasingly concerned about the possibility of suffering a crippling first strike in a future war. In February 1983 the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended to President Reagan a renewed national program for missile defense, a cause that had already been championed for years by the nuclear physicist Edward Teller and others. Reagan found this emphasis on defense, rather than offense, appealing on both moral and domestic political grounds and in a nationally televised address on 23 March 1983 he delivered a dramatic plea for this new Strategic Defense Initiative. By asking "Wouldn't it be better to save lives than to avenge them?" however, he raised the stated goal from the arcane but plausible one of protecting the nation's second strike capability to the unrealistic but emotionally appealing goal of creating an infallible space shield that could withstand even a massive nuclear attack.

SDI immediately became the subject of intense political controversy. Critics argued that it would extend the arms race into space and cause the Soviet Union to expand its own offensive nuclear forces. Furthermore, many of the proposed weapons—including neutron particle beams, rail guns, and lasers—represented exotic and un-proven new technologies. Defenders of SDI responded that the Soviet Union was already expanding its strategic forces at a rapid rate and that missile defense research continued in the Soviet Union as well. Reagan's immense personal popularity triumphed over a reluctant Congress, and by 1987 annual spending on SDI-related programs was more than $3 billion. Although the effect SDI had on the last years of the Cold War remains the subject of heated disagreement, it is apparent that Soviet leaders did take very seriously the threat it represented of a new and very expensive arms race that they could not hope to win.

In 1991 the program's goal was changed to intercepting only a small number of intermediate and long-range missiles, perhaps launched from a rogue state such as Iraq or North Korea. Though public interest had waned, funding quietly continued in the range of $3 billion to $4 billion annually throughout the administration of George H. W. Bush. In 1993 the Clinton administration surprised many by retaining the program, although it was renamed Ballistic Missile Defense and moderately scaled back. By the late 1990s, however, funding was again comparable to that of the years from 1987 to 1993, and following the commencement of a high-profile series of tests in 1999, the subject became once more a matter of great public debate. In 2002 President George W. Bush changed the program's name to Missile Defense Agency and withdrew from the 1972 ABM Treaty in order ultimately to deploy a national system of missile defense.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baucom, Donald R. The Origins of SDI, 1944–1983. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992. A revised version of the official history.

Fitzgerald, Frances. Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000. A critical account focusing on the personal role of Ronald Reagan.

McMahon, K. Scott. Pursuit of the Shield: The U.S. Quest for Limited Ballistic Missile Defense. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1997.

Missile Defense Agency. Homepage at http://www.acq.osd.mil/bmdo. Includes histories, congressional testimony, biographical sketches, and other information.

DavidRezelman

See alsoArms Race and Disarmament ; Missiles, Military .

Strategic Defense Initiative. On 23 March 1983, President Ronald Reagan called for a missile defense system that would make nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete.” The president's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was fiercely attacked by those who believed it scientifically impossible, fiscally irresponsible, and strategically dangerous, since it threatened to upset the delicate balance of the nuclear age. It was supported by those who both believed in the limitless potential of American technology and had never accepted mutual nuclear‐age vulnerability as inescapable.

Interest in ballistic missile defense began shortly after the end of World War II, with controversies over the development and deployment of an antiballistic missile (ABM) system and continuing until the United States and the Soviet Union placed severe restrictions on such work in April 1972. Reagan revived interest in a high‐tech shield at the urging of defense enthusiasts such as Edward Teller; Gen. Daniel O. Graham (ret.), former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency and founder of High Frontier, Inc., a missile defense advocacy group; members of the president's “kitchen cabinet”—brewer Joseph Coors, oilman William Wilson, and businessman Karl Bendetsen; and some members of Congress enthralled by Teller's vision of X‐ray laser weapons or chemical lasers. At least one member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff pronounced missile defense morally superior to deterrence through mutual vulnerability to counterattack, arguing that it is better to save lives than avenge them.

Despite a lavish research budget, SDI—derided by its opponents as “Star Wars,” after the 1977 science‐fiction movie directed by George Lucas—did not come to fruition during the Reagan presidency. A drum fire of criticism continued, however, including warnings that such a system would violate the 1972 ABM Treaty. A more modest vision of missile defense endured, however, and in 1999, President Bill Clinton recommended further research into the possibility of defense against missiles from “rogue” nations, a recommendation that reawakened the controversy over the feasibility and strategic advisability of this approach. In September 2000, after several failed tests, Clinton announced that he would leave to his successor the decision on whether to proceed further with a strategic defense system.

President George W. Bush, citing the risks of attack from North Korea or other rogue states, gave high priority to the testing and deployment of an anti-missile system. Dismissing protests from Russia and China, the Bush administration withdrew from the ABM Treaty, developed launch sites at Fort Greeley, Alaska, and in California, and planned for the deployment of anti-ballistic missiles aboard Navy ships operating in Asian waters. The administration pushed forward despite repeated test failures (interspersed with occasional successes) that deepened doubts about whether the system would actually work in combat conditions. Though overshadowed by other concerns, the Strategic Defense Initiative remained as central to U.S. planning, and nearly as controversial, in 2003 as it had been when first proposed by President Reagan two decades earlier.
See also Cold War; Nuclear Arms Control Treaties; Space Program.

Bibliography

Weapons in Space, Daedalus 1 and 2 (Spring and Summer 1985).
Edward Tabor Linenthal , Symbolic Defense: The Cultural Significance of the Strategic Defense Initiative, 1989.
William J. Broad , Teller's War: The Top‐Secret Story behind the Star Wars Deception, 1992.

Edward Linenthal

Paul S. Boyer

Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), former U.S. government program responsible for research and development of a space-based system to defend the nation from attack by strategic ballistic missiles (see guided missile ). The program is now administered by the Missile Defense Agency (originally the Strategic Defense Initiative Office), a separate agency in the U.S. Dept. of Defense . SDI, popularly referred to as "Star Wars," was announced by President Ronald Reagan in a speech in Mar., 1983, and was derided by critics as unrealistic. Space programs from other agencies and services were brought together in the organization. It has investigated many new technologies, including ground-based lasers, space-based lasers, and automated space vehicles. Critics argued that the original SDI program would encourage the militarization of space and destabilize the nuclear balance of power, and was technologically infeasible, based on untested technologies, and unable to defend against cruise missiles , airplanes, or several other possible delivery systems. In addition, some countermeasures to SDI technologies, such as decoy missiles and shielding of armed missiles, would be simple to implement. In 1987 the Soviet Union revealed it had a similar program.

The end of the cold war led to criticism that SDI was unnecessary, and in 1991 President G. H. W. Bush called for a more limited version using rocket-launched interceptors based on the ground at a single site. In 1993, SDI was reorganized as the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO). The more limited system, called the National Missile Defense (NMD), is intended to protect all 50 states from a rogue missile attack, but the deployment of such a system was forbidden under the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. Russia opposed the NMD plan but, under President Putin, also proposed a mobile, pan-European missile defense system with a similar purpose that would not violate the ABM treaty.

In 2001, President George W. Bush called for accelerated development of the NMD system, and subsequently withdrew from the ABM treaty to permit the system's development and deployment. Apparently successful early tests of the U.S. system were later revealed to have occurred after the odds of success had been enhanced (1984, 1991). Subsequent tests were generally more successful, although flawed or limited in certain respects, but tests in 2002, 2004, and 2005 involved failures. In 2002, President Bush ordered the deployment of a modest missile defense system by 2004, with interceptors based at sea (in the Pacific and, to a lesser degree, the Atlantic) and at Fort Greely, Alaska, and Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., and several interceptor missiles were emplaced by the end of 2004. Also in 2002, the BMDO was renamed the Missile Defense Agency (MDA). In addition to NMD, the MDA is also working to develop missile defenses for the battlefield as part of the Theater Missile Defense program. In 2007 the MDA reported that, although missile defense system was still under development and not officially operational, it was ready for use.

Antimissile systems stationed in Poland and Czech Republic were also proposed, and agreements signed with those nations in 2008; Russia objected strongly to the proposal. Those plans were abandoned (2009) under President Barack Obama , who proposed stationing interceptor missiles in SE Europe. In Nov., 2011, NATO agreed to establish a missile defense system that would incorporate the U.S. interceptors and protect all member nations, and Russia was invited to participate.

Bibliography: See studies by S. Lakoff and H. York (1989) and F. FitzGerald (2000).

STRATEGIC DEFENSE INITIATIVE

The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was a United States military research program that President Ronald Reagan first proposed in March 1983, shortly after branding the USSR an "evil empire." Its goal was to intercept incoming missiles in mid-course, high above the earth, hence making nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete." Nicknamed "Star Wars" by the media, the program entailed the use of space- and ground-based nuclear X-ray lasers, subatomic particle beams, and computer-guided projectiles fired by electromagnetic rail guns—all under the central control of a supercomputer system.

The Reagan administration peddled the program energetically within the United States and among NATO allies. In April 1984 a Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) was established within the Department of Defense. The program's futuristic weapons technologies, several of which were only in a preliminary research stage in the mid-1980s, were projected to cost anywhere from $100 billion to $1 trillion.

After Reagan's SDI speech, General Secretary Yuri Andropov denounced the program, telling a Pravda reporter that if Washington implemented SDI, the "floodgates of a runaway race of all types of strategic arms, both offensive and defensive" would open. Painfully aware of U.S. scientific and engineering skills, the Soviet leadership sought to eschew a costly technological arms race in which the United States was stronger.

With the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and USSR, signing of the START I and II treaties, and the 1992 presidential election of Bill Clinton, the SDI received lower budgetary priority (like many other weapons programs). In 1993 Defense Secretary Les Aspin announced the abandonment of SDI and its replacement by a less costly program that would make use of ground-based antimissile systems. The SDIO was then replaced by the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO).

In contrast to the actual expenditures on SDI (about $30 billion), spending on BMDO programs exceeded $4 billion annually in the late 1990s.

See also: anti-ballistic missile treaty; arms control; dÉtente; strategic arms reduction talks

bibliography

Anzovin, Steven. (1986). The Star Wars Debate. New York: Wilson.

Boffey, Philip M. (1988). Claiming the Heavens: The New York Times Complete Guide to the Star Wars Debate. New York: Times Books.

FitzGerald, Frances. (2000). Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War. New York: Simon & Schuster.

FitzGerald, Mary C. (1987). Soviet Views on SDI. Pittsburgh, PA: Center for Russian and East European Studies, University of Pittsburgh.

Teller, Edward. (1987). Better a Shield than a Sword: Perspectives on Defense and Technology. New York: Free Press.

Johanna Granville

SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative) (USA) A US defence system intended to protect the USA from ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles) by destroying them in space before they reached their target. Its development was started under Reagan in 1983, when huge funds were spent on the development of the SDI despite criticism that it could never be infallible. While it worsened US–Soviet relations and inaugurated a new round in the arms race between the two countries, pressure from the programme contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Empire, whose military and financial resources were already overstretched. During the 1990s the unsuccessful programme was abandoned, but under President George W. Bush the concept was revived by his controversial endorsement of the nuclear missile defense programme.

Strategic Defense Initiative SDI a proposal by President Ronald Reagan on March 23, 1983, to construct a strategic defense system against attack from intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM s), potentially from the Soviet Union. Popularly referred to as “Star Wars” after the science fiction film, the Strategic Defense Initiative was conceived as a way to intercept ICBMs from ground, air, and space using a combination of radar, optical, and infrared detection systems and laser beams. Congress initially approved the program in the 1980s, but political controversy, the fall of the Soviet Union, and problems regarding technological feasibility impeded its progress. The project was renamed the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization in 1993.

Strategic Defense Initiative (abbr.: SDI) • a military defense strategy proposed by President Ronald Reagan in 1983, in which enemy weapons would be destroyed in space by lasers, antiballistic missiles, etc., launched or directed from orbiting military satellites.

SDI • abbr. Strategic Defense Initiative.

SDI abbr. Strategic Defense Initiative.

SDI. See Strategic Defense Initiative.

Strategic Defense Initiative, see SDI