Word: sdi
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...Pahute Mesa, Nev., northwest of Las Vegas, the U.S. exploded a device (code-named Goldstone) designed to channel the energy of a nuclear blast into a concentrated, powerful beam of X-rays that could knock out a missile or warhead. Indeed, it may have been the Soviets' fear of SDI that pushed the Kremlin to show some flexibility on verification, in the hope of winning a ban on future tests of such Star Wars technology...
...many issues, the outlines of a potential agreement have been apparent for some time. Its centerpiece would be an "offense-defense trade-off": the Soviet Union would accept deep cuts in its most accurate, powerful offensive weapons--land-based ballistic-missile warheads--in exchange for the U.S.'s restricting SDI...
...invest in expensive countermeasures at a time when Mikhail Gorbachev wants to build up the industrial and civilian sectors of the economy. Karpov laid down a proposal in Geneva last fall under which the Soviet Union would give up half of its land-based warheads if the U.S. canceled SDI. There have been some high-level hints that the Soviet definition of cancellation would be a ban on testing and deployment but not on the research phase of the program...
Some American experts believe that the offense-defense trade-off would be a good deal: if the U.S. were less threatened by Soviet offenses, it would have less need for a massive network of orbiting battle stations to shield it from an attack. Many scientists question whether SDI will work, and the research necessary to find out is dauntingly expensive. The Administration wants $26 billion over the next five years, and deployment might cost a cool trillion or more. Especially in an era of deficit reduction and Pentagon cost cutting, there is growing resistance in Congress to funding SDI. Says...
...date, Reagan has shown no inclination to bargain away SDI to accept any limits on it. At their summit in November, Reagan tried in vain to convince Gorbachev that large-scale strategic defenses were in the interests of world peace; Gorbachev tried just as unsuccessfully to interest Reagan in an offense-defense trade-off. Because of the President's very personal--and at the same time very public--commitment to the dream that someday space-based defenses might render nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete," it is politically dangerous for any member of his Administration to advocate compromise...