Reagan's Star Wars Speech - March 23, 1983 - Thirty years ago
The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was proposed by U.S. President Ronald Reagan on March 23, 1983,[1] to use ground and space-based systems to protect the United States from attack by strategic nuclear ballistic missiles. The initiative focused on strategic defense rather than the prior strategic offense doctrine of mutual assured destruction (MAD). The Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) was set up in 1984 within the United States Department of Defense to oversee the Strategic Defense Initiative.
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A few months later:
Modern Nuclear-War Deterrence Begins With Nuke Locks
By Tim Weiner Mar 24, 2013 3:30 PM GMT-0700
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In June 1983, at the National War College on the banks of the Potomac River, the first truly realistic nuclear war game took place. Tensions between Washington and Moscow were high that summer, higher even than anyone realized at the time. The war game was code-named Proud Prophet, and there were no stand- ins: Reagan’s secretary of defense, his chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and hundreds of senior military officers played themselves, holding in their hands the actual war plans of the U.S.
Bracken was invited to be its “Thucydidean chronicler,” in his words. He tells the story for the first time in his new book.
Armageddon
Proud Prophet began with political crises from the Mediterranean to the Pacific. It ended in Armageddon -- “a catastrophe that made all the wars of the past five hundred years pale in comparison,” Bracken writes. “A half billion human beings were killed in the initial exchanges and at least that many more would have died from radiation and starvation. NATO was gone. So was a good part of Europe, the United States, and the Soviet Union. Major parts of the northern hemisphere would be uninhabitable for decades.”
The American military leaders in this game were not crazy or suicidal. They were faithfully executing plans and strategies that a tight little circle of experts had been polishing and perfecting for a quarter of a century. The outcome shocked them. After Proud Prophet, the U.S. stopped rattling sabers and started talking sense about the prospects of nuclear war. In his next State of the Union speech, Reagan said: “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”
When you look at the war plans we had, and I’ve seen them in outline, you react the way Reagan did the first time he saw them upon taking office. “He became physically sick,” Bracken writes. “The briefing had to be cancelled and rescheduled.”
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(Tim Weiner, a former reporter for the New York Times, has won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for writing on national security. He is the author, most recently, of “Enemies: A History of the FBI.” The opinions expressed are his own.)
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If we don't have a (perceived) powerful enemy then we don't need to spend billions and trillions on national defense. If we don't spend all of that money on national defense, what do we have to be proud of as a country? Surely we couldn't be proud of our non-military accomplishments and stir feelings of patriotism if we don't have images of tanks, expensive aircraft, and big boats to marvel.
If the Soviets would have agreed to a SALT treaty in 1984 think of all of the buildup that could have never occurred.
Instead, we'd have to resort to things like our scientific prowess, our education system, and taking care of our own people as things to invest in and to be proud of. Any freedom-loving flag-waiving American surely could never be proud of stuff like that!
One of our accomplishments that I'm most proud of is the landing of astronauts on the mood. I know it was surrounded by military implications, but for mankind that was a huge step. Major scientific and explorational accomplishments like that should be the sorts of things nations are proud of. Not their ability to wage war decisively on people.
I read something quite a while back that, at almost any point during the cold war, had the Soviets launched any sort of attack with conventional ground forces that we would have replied by launching nukes. That was pretty much standard policy during all of the presidencies of that era.
