Word: sdi
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Most American scientists think an impregnable astrodome over the U.S. is sheer fantasy. Yet even a faulty SDI would force the Soviets to take costly countermeasures. Gorbachev put Reagan on notice that if the U.S. proceeded with SDI, the Kremlin would have no choice but to pull out of START. Soviet officials reiterated that warning last week...
Bush has never been a true believer in SDI, although as Vice President he paid lip service to the program as part of the catechism of the Reagan Administration. SDI is still sacred to the Republican hard right, so Bush lets his Vice President, Dan Quayle, champion the latest Star Wars brainstorm: "Brilliant Pebbles," an orbiting complex of miniaturized rockets that makes about as much sense as the name suggests. Since even the testing of space-based interceptors is prohibited by the ABM treaty and would therefore jeopardize Moscow's continued compliance with START, Brilliant Pebbles is more...
...Scud, and you've got the stuff of which a new nightmare is made. Arms control should make an attack by a Third World country on the U.S. less plausible rather than more so. To fend off scores or even hundreds of warheads, the U.S. needs not SDI but a network of ground-based interceptors at perhaps three to five sites. The ABM treaty allows only one site, but it could be amended to permit more. At the same time, the ban on testing and deployment of space- based systems should be strengthened, since those are what could undermine...
...years Sam Nunn, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has been advocating what he calls a "limited-protection system." Last week the Senate endorsed that goal. The gung-ho SDI enthusiasts don't like the scheme because they believe, correctly, that Nunn doesn't want Brilliant Pebbles to get off the ground. On the other side are arms-control purists who see the ABM treaty as holy writ and fear it can't survive any tinkering...
...Thus SDI has suddenly gained a new respectability. The White House and Senate minority leader Robert Dole are encouraging more spending on the system. Mindful that the Soviet Union still has 2,300 ICBMs in its arsenal, and confident that the U.S. public no longer views Star Wars as an unattainable magic elixir, the Pentagon proposes to boost SDI research from its present $3.2 billion to $4.6 billion...