Word: sdi
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...later this year. This time around, such a meeting cannot be a success unless there is concrete progress in arms control, and progress will almost certainly depend on some give in the U.S. position. Reagan may decide, or be convinced by his more moderate aides, that restricting SDI to research does not mean killing the program or giving up the hope that what is discovered in the lab may someday free mankind from the nuclear threat...
Former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger predicts that even if Reagan decided to go for a trade-off, he would have difficulty with his conservative constituency: "The President's big dilemma is that after the 1984 election, he legitimized SDI as a symbol of the true faith. He has jettisoned five years of rhetoric about the Evil Empire; he has restored a climate of détente. But the right wing still regarded the summit as a triumph. Why? Because he didn't give away SDI. That means if he moves to trade it away in the next year...
Another former Pentagon official, William Perry, who was in charge of military research during the Carter Administration, is concerned about what will happen if the Soviets decide that Reagan is irrevocably committed to SDI. Perry is concerned that if the U.S. uses the space shuttle to carry out a demonstration of a laser weapon in the next year, "we may have pushed ourselves beyond a point of no return with the Soviets so that they'll start acting as though we have such a system. Instead of concentrating on diplomacy, they'll pull out the stops in their military programs...
Reagan said that late on Sunday afternoon he made "an entirely new proposal" to Gorbachev: "a ten-year delay in deployment of SDI in exchange for the complete elimination of all ballistic missiles from the respective arsenals of both nations." It was the Soviet leader, Reagan said, who balked. "The General Secretary said he would consider our offer only if we restricted all work on SDI to laboratory research, which would have killed our defensive shield...
Shultz, meanwhile, was briefing the American press in Iceland. He said there had been the possibility of reaching "very sweeping and substantial and important agreements." But the President, he argued, simply could not have given in on the SDI issue. "In the end, with great reluctance, the President, having worked so hard, creatively and constructively for these potentially tremendous achievements, simply had to refuse to compromise the security of the U.S., of our allies and freedom by abandoning the shield that has held in front of freedom." White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan put the failure in more direct...