Word: sdi
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...question was whether this would further jeopardize any chance for negotiating the beginnings of an arms-control accord. That chance was never scintillating: the Soviets have offered deep cuts in nuclear missiles only if the U.S. cancels SDI, and Reagan at the U.N. reaffirmed his determination to proceed with that program. Reagan's introduction of other topics does not improve the prospects for bargaining on this score, and his proposals on regional conflicts, although justifiable, are unlikely to prove negotiable. It is remotely possible that the Soviets, seeking a way to extricate themselves from the endless guerrilla war in Afghanistan...
Navy Commander James Offutt, a deputy director in the Strategic Defense Initiative office, concedes the difficulty of producing and verifying error-free Star Wars software. "We don't have all the answers," he says. "But that is what SDI is all about. It is a research program." One way to test the system thoroughly, he says, may be through computer simulations of a full-scale nuclear war--a goal he thinks can eventually be achieved. Brockway Mac-Millan, a retired vice president at Bell Laboratories who directed the development of the Safeguard antiballistic-missile software system in the early 1970s...
...landmark speech calling on the U.S. to build a shield that would render Moscow's nuclear missiles "impotent and obsolete." Whether or not the U.S. could build such a Star Wars shield was less important than the Soviets' knowledge that they themselves never could. The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) quickly became an obsession of the Soviet leadership. Konstantin Chernenko and Mikhail Gorbachev tried to derail it through propaganda and arms control. But Reagan steadfastly refused to give...
Reagan's boosters argue that it took a weapon that never worked to win a war that was never fought. For having failed to kill the program, the Soviets were prodded by SDI into trying to modernize their society--which could only be achieved by liberalization. "I used to think SDI didn't have a great impact," says Lawrence Korb, who was an Assistant Secretary of Defense during the Reagan Administration. "But as I meet former Soviet marshals and talk to them, I'm increasingly convinced it had a major impact. The Soviets feared it could work, and that...
...what your foreign policy is." Five years later, on his return from the Reykjavik summit, Reagan sounds a bit frustrated that the Soviets aren't buying his promise to share Star Wars technology in exchange for a reduction in all offensive missiles. "I have never entertained a thought that SDI could be a bargaining chip. I did tell Gorbachev that if and when we had such a system ... we'd share such a defense with them. I don't think he believes...