There can be no doubt that with the departure from the White House of Ronald Reagan, the father of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), the quality of blessing for this endeavor from the highest level will diminish markedly. But those who are speculating that, in the Bush era, strategic defense will be just another defense program are almost certainly wrong. For good or ill, strategic defense has enjoyed, or suffered from, a very special status since the mid-to-late 1960s.
For reasons that far transcend the scope of this essay, strategic defense has been defined as the leading challenge to the stability of deterrence. Fears of strategic defense have been alleged to drive the strategic arms race and have been predicted to raise the risks of war by generating dangerous instabilities. Stability, so the orthodox creed of the arms control illuminati has maintained, reposes in assuredly invulnerable offensive weapons and assuredly vulnerable societies (see Jerome H. Kahan, Security in the Nuclear Age, 1975).
Reagan put strategic defense on the front burner of policy debate, relegitimized the idea of active defense, and blessed a program of research and development that caught the Soviets' attention as nothing else has in the past two decades. But the Regan administration failed to achieve a strategy consensus on the value of SDI and, in part as a consequence, failed to build a political consensus adequate for the serious revision of, let alone the U.S. withdrawal from, the ABM Treaty of 1972.
Reagan surprised the world and most of his advisers on March 23, 1983, by challenging the U.S. defense-scientific community to see if they could find ways of rendering nuclear-armed ballistic missiles "impotent and obsolete." Despite small straws in the wind concerning a change in official policy toward strategic defense prior to that date, to all intents and purposes the presidential suggestion hit the ground with no preparation for such a radical turn in official thinking.
It is predictable that, one day, SDI will be a real military program geared to produce actual weapons, but one can see that that condition currently is nowhere in sight. What is more, there is probably no way in which the SDI could have succeeded politically in the mid-to-late 1980s, even had the relevant technology been a lot readier for deployment than has been the case.
A democracy will embark with considerable haste on a vastly expensive, technologically uncertain defense enterprise when a clear and pressing need is perceived. For example, in World War II the United States developed the atomic bomb and the B-29 Super-fortress; in the 1950s the United States developed, among other things, the hydrogen bomb, the submarine-launched ballistic missile, and the ICBM. The American body politic appeased its sense of foreign danger in the early Reagan years by adding a lot of money to the defense budget.
Fear of Soviet military power was much diminished by 1983-84, as the president's vision of strategic defense was translated into the activities of the newly created Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO). The administration was serious about demanding more money for defense, but the president's March 23, 1983, surprise on strategic defense reinforced the general opinion that the strategic modernization program--to which the SDI could be a noteworthy
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