President Reagan calls for launching ‘Star Wars’ initiative, March 23, 1983
In a speech from the Oval Office on this day in 1983, President Ronald Reagan called for defending the United States against a first-strike attack by developing a Strategic Defense Initiative system. It gained the nickname “Star Wars,” after the futuristic Hollywood movie.
Reagan’s goal was to mount a near-total defense against a massive sophisticated intercontinental ballistic missile attack. Star Wars called for building a network of ground-based and space-based systems to shield the country; the space-based portion would have used lasers armed with nuclear warheads to shoot down incoming Soviet missiles.
SDI wasn’t the first U.S. defensive system against nuclear ballistic missiles. In the 1960s, the Pentagon developed but did not deploy the Sentinel program in a bid to offer a limited defensive shield. Subsequently, the U.S. Air Force utilized some Sentinel technology for its Safeguard program, which was briefly deployed to defend a single location. (In the 1970s, the Soviet Union deployed a missile defense system to defend Moscow and nearby missile sites.)
If SDI worked as advertised and had been adopted, it would have moved the nation’s strategic defenses away from mutual assured destruction, or MAD. While MAD served as the long-standing mantra of preventing the Cold War from becoming a hot one, Reagan viewed it as a dual suicide pact.
A partisan debate ensued in Congress. Democrats questioned the feasibility and strategic wisdom of such a program, while Republicans talked about its strategic necessity and offered several technical experts who argued that it was feasible — including Edward Teller, the “father” of the hydrogen bomb. The advocates prevailed; research funding began in fiscal 1984.
In his 1991 State of the Union address, President George H.W. Bush shifted the focus of SDI from defense of North America against large-scale strikes to a system focusing on theater missile defense — which he dubbed Global Protection Against Limited Strikes. In 1993, President Bill Clinton changed the name to the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization and narrowed its thrust to regional coverage. BMDO is now called the Missile Defense Agency.
Although never developed or deployed, the SDI effort served as a precursor for some of the anti-ballistic missile systems President Donald Trump advocates today. The MDA’s mission is to develop, test and prepare for deployment of a missile defense system.
Using complementary interceptors, land-, sea-, air- and space-based sensors, and battle management command and control systems, the system, if proven effective, would be able to engage all classes and ranges of ballistic missile threats. The technology is based on “hit-to-kill,” akin to striking a bullet with a bullet — a capability that has been successfully demonstrated in several tests.
On Jan. 1, 2017, North Korea announced it was preparing to test an ICBM which, if deployed and weaponized, could strike the North American continent with a nuclear bomb.
SOURCE: WWW.MDA.MIL