'Star Wars' today: What would Reagan do?

President Reagan stunned fellow citizens and the world 30 years ago this month with a dramatic announcement that the United States would develop and deploy a system capable of intercepting and destroying strategic ballistic missiles. Like President Kennedy's pledge to send a man to the moon, Reagan's vision was meant to stretch minds to new realities that most found inconceivable.

As the Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI, developed, this vision encompassed three big ideas. First, technological advances would make it possible to "hit a bullet with a bullet." Second, when fully deployed, this missile defense system would "render nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete." For Reagan, this was an essential steppingstone to his even grander vision of a world free of nuclear weapons. Third, to persuade America's Cold War adversary to eliminate its superpower nuclear arsenal as well, Reagan proposed to share this SDI technology with Moscow.

All three dimensions of Reagan's vision drew immediate, fiery criticism at home and abroad. Skeptics argued that killing a missile with a missile was technically impossible. Thirty years and more than $150 billion of investment later, this objection has been largely overcome. Today, the United States and its allies have deployed missile defense systems for shorter-range missiles (for example, the Israeli Iron Dome and U.S. Patriot systems) and for longer-range missiles (the sea-based Aegis system and a ground-based system deployed in Alaska). Just this month, in response to North Korea's threats, the Obama administration announced plans to deploy an additional 14 ground-based interceptors.

Reagan's vision of a world free of nuclear weapons was initially rejected by most of the American establishment as naive and dangerous. In the last decade, however, four of the bluest chips from the American Cold War establishment — George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, William Perry and Sam Nunn — have put this back on the American strategic agenda.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-allison-missile-defense-reagan-20130328,0,6240638.story