Word: sdi
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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...
...President, he kept pressure on the Soviets at a time when they were beginning to fail internally. He pushed for SDI, the strategic defense missile system that was rightly understood by the Soviets as both a financial challenge and an intimidating expression of the power of U.S. scientific innovation...
...consider a more relevant fact: If it was a bluff, the Soviets didn't know it. And more to the point, Reagan as President had the credibility with the Soviets to make a serious threat. (And a particularly Reaganesque threat it was: he said not only would we build SDI, but we would also share it with them...
...government has been fighting "the 'real' cold war" against what Corso says the military calls EBEs, or extraterrestrial biological entities. Fortunately, it turns out, Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative tipped the balance of power. As Corso writes, "[The U.S. and U.S.S.R.] both knew who the real targets of SDI were... When we deployed our advanced particle-beam weapon and tested it in orbit for all to see, the EBEs knew and we knew that they knew that we had our defense of the planet in place...