Word: sdi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...devised a cunning booby trap. She equates the mystery of Reagan with the mystery of "Star Wars," his plan (visionary or goofy, depending) to erect an umbrella of space-borne laser and particle-beam weapons to protect America from nuclear attack. She examines Star Wars (the Strategic Defense Initiative, SDI) and pronounces it no mystery at all, but merely an expensive, stupid idea. The same, she suggests, may therefore be said of Reagan. He cooked up SDI, she thinks, mostly to deflect the nuclear-freeze movement...
Conservatives believe that SDI, along with the massive American military buildup in the '80s, was the strategy by which Reagan forced the Soviets to bankrupt themselves, hastening the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The timing of those events, at the end of the Reagan years, disconcerts Reagan's critics. They claim that the Soviet collapse was the result of long years of economic inefficiency and deterioration, and of Gorbachev's loosening of the bolts through glasnost and perestroika...