The idea of a “space shield,” a largely space-based defense against nuclear attack, was unknown to most Americans before President Reagan tentatively endorsed it in a speech in March 1983. Yet the debate over the space shield, quickened by the fires of presidential politics in 1984, has been so fierce that the argument has already gone through several generations. In the first round, going back several years before the Reagan speech, strategic-defense advocates mostly concerned themselves with selling the basic strategic concept: that defense could enhance deterrence while holding out the hope of making nuclear missiles obsolete, whereas mutual assured destruction (MAD) obliged us constantly to expand our nuclear arsenal merely to maintain the balance of terror. Some advocates, notably Lieutenant General Daniel O. Graham head of the High Frontier project, which launched SDI’s public career did make specific suggestions about the outlines of a feasible strategic defense. And the Defense Department had been engaged for some years in research aimed at producing usable strategic-defense weapons. But, for the most part, in the eyes of SDI advocates SDI was a strategic concept, not a system.
Nevertheless, as the concept was publicized, it was subjected to an intimidating storm of highly specific, if also scattershot, criticisms by a number of scientists. Some of these scientists were clearly politically motivated, some sincere. But they had a common approach, which was to find concrete weaknesses (laser satellites wouldn’t be powerful enough, ICBMs could be protected, computers smart enough to aim space weapons couldn’t be built, etc.) in defense systems that did not yet exist even on a drawing board, unless on the drawing boards of the critics.
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