Word: shield
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
...Indeed, the initial reductions in strategic weapons would tilt the balance dangerously in the Soviets' favor. In addition, the whole scheme appears to hang on a condition that Gorbachev knows Reagan resists: U.S. abandonment of the Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars, whose goal is to develop a defensive shield against nuclear missiles...
...more sensible to eliminate those arms?" Reagan is caught in a public relations bind: it will be difficult for him to explain convincingly why he is prepared to scuttle a plan to rid the world of nuclear missiles by insisting on the right to build a defensive shield against those missiles. The Soviets are likely to confront Reagan with the somewhat illogical statement he made in his Oct. 31 interview with four Soviet journalists, in which he pledged to seek the elimination of nuclear missiles before deploying a defense against them...
...Supreme Court has reversed Kaufman before in this case, when the judge ruled in 1977 that libel plaintiffs do not have the right to probe a journalist's thoughts. Whether Colonel Herbert's controversial case will finally prove to be a sword to skewer the press or a shield to protect it remains to be seen...
After two intensive days of bargaining, Mikhail Gorbachev would not relent in his insistence that Ronald Reagan's cherished Strategic Defense Initiative, designed to serve as a space-based shield against ballistic missiles, be confined to "laboratory research." And Reagan was equally adamant that the U.S. retain the right not only to conduct scientific research on new Star Wars weapons but to develop and test them as well...