Word: threatfully
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Underlying Reagan's speech last week was his unwavering contention that questions about the proper level of military spending should be divorced from the nation's overall budgetary and fiscal situation. The determining factor, Reagan insisted, should be the level of threat posed by the Soviets. "Our defense establishment must be evaluated to see what is necessary to protect against any or all of the potential threats," he said. "The cost of achieving these ends is totaled up and the result is the budget for national defense...
Some skeptics charged that the speech was part of an increasing Pentagon propensity toward "threat inflation." Explained Congressman Les Aspin of Wisconsin: "We are seeing a more exaggerated and disingenuous presentation of the Soviet threat than we have seen in the past." As an example of how this works, critics point to Defense Department hype two years ago for the new Soviet T-80 tank. It was depicted in briefings and a Pentagon publication as fast, heavily armored and bristling with grenade and missile launchers. That was when the Administration was anxious to secure funding for America...
...speech (80% out of 2,800 in favor). Said Senior Adviser Michael Deaver: "He has had the most favorable response to any speech since he was elected President." But editorial reaction from around the country was more skeptical. The Atlanta Constitution, which labeled Reagan's characterization of the Soviet threat as "huckstering misimpressions," said that by "raising the remote possibility of a sci-fi defense against Soviet missiles, he risked destabilizing the U.S.-Soviet military balance?already dangerously tenuous." The Chicago Sun Times called the speech "an appalling disservice." Said the Detroit Free Press: "Reagan's vision of a 21st...
There was some feeling, however, that Reagan's challenge to a system of deterrence that is based on the threat of mutual destruction could be a welcome element in the debate over nuclear policy. "Reagan now suggests that we slowly start investigating whether in the next century technology may offer a solution to our security that does not rest on the prospect of mass and mutual death," noted the Washington Post. "It is the product of Ronald Reagan's peculiar knack for asking an obvious question, one that has moral as well as political dimensions and one that the experts...
...that the Soviet Union does not observe its own moratorium on the deployment of medium-range missiles [in Europe]." When he addressed Reagan's idea of space-age defensive ABMs, Andropov became heated. "It is a bid to disarm the Soviet Union in the face of the U.S. nuclear threat," he said. The relation between offensive and defensive weapons cannot be severed, he argued. "It is time Washington stopped devising one option after another in search of the best ways of unleashing nuclear war in the hope of winning it. Engaging in this is not just irresponsible, it is insane...