THE SHIELD OF FAITH
The Hidden Struggle for Strategic Defense
B. Bruce-Briggs
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988
464 pp., $22.95
"Let me share with you a vision of the future which offers
hope. . . . What if free people could live secure in the
knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat
of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack; that
we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles
before they reached our own soil or that of our
allies?. . . I call upon the scientific community who
gave us nuclear weapons to turn their great talents to the
cause of making those nuclear weapons impotent and
obsolete."
---Ronald Reagan
March 23, 1983
Despite the mountain of published material on the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) since President Reagan introduced the concept in March 1983, relatively few people now, almost six years later, know precisely what SDI is or understand what it is meant to do. This is partly due to a failure of the Great Communicator to communicate adequately, and partly due to a great effort by its detractors to discredit and put an end to this ambitious program. The Shield of Faith provides a greater measure of understanding to the public, not only about SDI itself, but about the background of programs and policies that have brought us to this point. For example, while the present program may be the first to be formally designated as a "strategic defense initiative," it is really only the most recent of a series of strategic defense initiatives undertaken since World War II. President Truman had a strategic defense initiative. President Eisenhower had one; so did Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Carter. In every case, however, more resources were put into the offense than into the defense. It still remains to be seen what will happen to President Reagan's initiative.
B. Bruce-Briggs described his book as a chronicle, not a history. The problem with writing a history in the national security field, he points out, is that so much of what matters is classified, and so much of what has been declassified is questionable. Real information, he notes, is transmitted orally, and this book was based almost entirely on information obtained through interviews, conversations, and discussions, bolstered by some library research and also by simply listening to others. As a result, the historians and the literary critics will probably sneer at it or ignore it altogether, even though it makes for informative and entertaining reading. In fact, it contains a great wealth of background information about the people and events behind the SDI program. Even the insiders and the participants in these events will learn something from this fascinating and irreverent account.
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