The Enduring Issues for U.S. Missile Defenses

摘要

In January 1983, 70 percent of Americans supported a nuclear arms freeze, and domestic politics was pushing the White House to do something. President Ronald Reagan's March 23, 1983, speech was designed to show that his administration understood the Cold War fears of many Americans and would undertake a technological solution, the Strategic Defense Initiative. Nearly all of Reagan's speech was to justify increased Department of Defense (DoD) spending to counter the Soviet threat that he mentioned nearly 50 times. Reagan didn't turn to missile defense until his speech was nearly 90 percent complete when he posed the question, "What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could inter- cept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?" The concept may have been new to some Americans, but not to the DoD.