Word: sdi
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...John Sununu, Quayle became a voluble participant in strategy sessions. He lined up with Sununu and Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, for instance, to support a relatively high budget for the Strategic Defense Initiative. Then it was Quayle who laid out in a major speech the Administration's line on SDI...
...about the Strategic Defense Initiative. What fizzled was not the payload -- a satellite designed to generate Buck Rogers-style neutral-particle beams in space -- but a thoroughly conventional solid-fuel Aries booster. Coming after an aborted mission in March using a Delta launcher, the unsuccessful mission crystallized suspicion that SDI is so riddled with potential failures that it will never get off the ground...
...critical issue, the President ruled out any compromise. The U.S. is prepared to abide by the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty for seven to ten years after a START agreement is ratified. The Soviets insist that even after that period, the U.S. should continue to refrain from deployment of SDI. Bush decided not to relax U.S. insistence on the ultimate right to install the system. He acted in part to avoid irritating his conservative supporters. But the Soviets say they will not agree to START without continuing constraints on SDI...
...fuss, SDI seems moribund. Despite appropriations of $17 billion over the past six years, there are no realistic prospects of deploying a Star Wars system for a decade. SDI has remained singularly unpopular in Congress, which has cut every White House request for SDI funding. This year Bush himself reduced the Reagan request from $5.6 billion to $4.6 billion, and Congress might slash even more...
Part of the problem is the consistent inability of SDI's designers to define its "architecture," the way it is supposed to work. Originally, there was much talk of space-age particle beams and laser weapons, until the practical difficulties of those technologies became apparent. In 1986 the fad was nuclear-generated X-ray lasers. Last year the SDI organization, fearful that Congress would further cut funding in the absence of a tangible program, pressured the Pentagon into endorsing "Phase I," a system of ground- and space-based sensors and interceptor rockets...