The Star Wars Joke That Helped Bring the Soviets to the Table

Take a serious proposal from a Republican President, give it a nickname from a science fiction movie, and watch how many editorial boards stop thinking and start laughing. The Strategic Defense Initiative, announced in March 1983, got the treatment within days. It became "Star Wars," and the name stuck so hard that people who could not tell you what it proposed could tell you it was ridiculous.

Meanwhile, in Moscow, nobody was laughing. That is the whole story in one paradox: the program the American press found silly was the program the Soviet leadership found alarming. The joke was on the people telling it. In this post I'll do what I think every honest argument should do, which is state the critics' case at its strongest and then answer it from the record, with dates. Then you can decide who was laughing at whom.

What Reagan actually said

On March 23, 1983, President Reagan gave a televised address on defense and national security. Most of it was a case for the defense budget. Near the end he turned to a question he had been thinking about for some time. Americans, he said, had relied for decades on the threat of retaliation to keep the peace. Wouldn't it be better, he asked, to save lives than to avenge them? He called on the scientific community, the people who had given us nuclear weapons in the first place, to turn their talents to giving us the means of rendering those weapons impotent and obsolete.

That sentence is the one that matters, and it is worth reading in the full text of the speech, which is easy to find. He did not promise a perfect shield by next Tuesday. He called it a long-term research effort and he said plainly that it would take years, possibly decades. He also said the aim was to be a defense, one that would threaten no one. The program that followed, the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization, was set up in 1984 to study how.

Why does that matter? Because the premise of the Cold War, mutual assured destruction, was a suicide pact with a respectable name. It said: we are safe because each of us can kill the other's whole country, so neither will start. Reagan found that morally and strategically unsatisfying, and he said so. The question underneath his proposal was simple: if there is any chance of protecting your children instead of promising to avenge them, why wouldn't you try? You do not have to be a nuclear physicist to see the force of it.

The critics' case at its strongest

Now the other side, stated the way its best advocates would state it. There were four serious arguments.

One: cost. A full space-based shield, as sketched in the early 1980s, would have been astronomically expensive, a national commitment to a program that might never work. Money spent there was money not spent on forces that could actually be used.

Two: technical doubt. Many respected physicists and engineers argued that the task of hitting thousands of warheads traveling at enormous speed, mixed in with decoys and under every kind of countermeasure, was not achievable with the technology of the day, and perhaps not at all. The software alone, they said, could never be tested under real conditions.

Three: it would be cheaper to beat than to build. If the Soviets could add decoys and more warheads for less money than the shield cost to expand, the shield would be a losing race. The offense has the advantage, so why spend on the defense?

Four: it threatens stability. This is the strongest argument. The logic of mutual deterrence rested on each side's cities being open to attack. A shield, even a partial one, might tempt a side to think it could strike first and absorb the weakened response. Then the other side, fearing exactly that, would be tempted to strike first itself. A defensive weapon might produce an offensive crisis. The 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, signed by Nixon and Brezhnev on May 26, 1972, had been built on the proposition that both sides should limit their defenses precisely to avoid this. Reagan's program, the critics said, would tear up the foundation of arms control.

These are not stupid arguments. They were made by serious people in good faith. But they have answers.

The answers, in numbered points

1. On cost and feasibility: nobody knew, and the only way to find out was to try. The critics asserted certainty about a technology that did not yet exist. Confident predictions that something cannot be done have a long record of aging badly in this country, and the Moon landing is the easy example. A research program is not a construction contract. It is a bet on discovery, and the stakes justified a bet. In June 1984 an experimental interceptor launched from Kwajalein Atoll hit a mock warhead in space in a test often cited as the first successful hit-to-kill intercept of that kind, with no explosive charge, only the force of collision. It did not prove a shield was around the corner, but it did refute the claim that the thing was impossible in principle.

1. On offense versus defense: that is an argument for making the Soviets pay, not for staying out. The Soviet Union was the weaker economy. By most estimates it was already spending a far larger share of its output on the military than we were. If the critics were right that countering our defense would be cheap, then no Soviet leader would have cared about it. Yet they cared a great deal, which shows they did not believe it would be cheap. A technological competition against a richer, more innovative adversary was the one contest Moscow was most afraid of.

1. On stability: the 1972 treaty did not make us safe; it made us hostage. The ABM Treaty limited each side to two defensive sites, later reduced to one. The logic was dispassionate and grim: leave your people undefended so the other side feels safe. Meanwhile the Soviets deployed a defensive system around Moscow, built a large radar at Krasnoyarsk that the United States said violated the treaty, and in the end the Soviet foreign minister admitted in 1989 that it did. We were being asked to observe a rule the other side was bending. Arms control that only one side honors is not stability. It is a handicap.

1. On the idea that it was just a fantasy: then why did Moscow treat it so seriously? This is the clincher. The Soviet leadership, including Mikhail Gorbachev after 1985, insisted again and again that SDI had to be restricted. If it was fantasy, they could have waved it off. They did not, because they feared two things: that the technology might work in part, and that they could not match it without wrecking their economy.

What Moscow was afraid of

Let me spell out why the Kremlin took the idea seriously, because it is the part the nickname hides. Soviet strength was in the size of its rocket forces and the weight of its armies. Its weakness was in the things that a missile shield would need: microelectronics, computing, sensors, and the industrial base that turns laboratory results into reliable hardware. An economy built on five-year plans does not turn on a dime to chase a new technology. Open societies with venture capital, university labs and engineers who change jobs every few years do. In a race over the technologies of the next century, the Soviet system would be playing away from home.

There was a second fear, which was political. Soviet leaders understood that an American President who had won a landslide in 1984 and who spoke so freely about the moral problem with relying on threats was not bluffing about wanting a different world. They could not know how far Congress would fund it, and they could not be sure it would fail. When you are the weaker party, uncertainty is expensive, because you have to plan for the worst case. That is one of the oldest mechanisms in strategy, and it has nothing to do with whether the program ever produced a single working orbital platform. Hypothetically, picture a homeowner who hears that his neighbor, who already outspends him, is considering a fence that might be built within ten years. He does not wait to find out. He begins to rework his budget now. The program does not have to work. It has to look as if it might.

That is also why the "bargaining chip" label, which critics used and some of Reagan's own aides sometimes used, misses the point. A chip you are willing to trade is a chip the other side will wait for you to trade. Reykjavik showed that Reagan was not willing, and that fact is what made the chip worth something.

Reykjavik: the moment Reagan walked

The proof is in the summit record. In October 1986, Reagan and Gorbachev met in Reykjavik, Iceland, on the 11th and 12th. The talks went further than anyone expected. The two men discussed deep cuts in strategic arms, and at one stage the discussion reached the idea of eliminating ballistic missiles, and even of eliminating nuclear weapons altogether. It was a breathtaking weekend.

Then came the hitch. Gorbachev's price for the package was that SDI be confined to the laboratory for ten years. Reagan refused. He would continue research, testing and development, whatever the Soviets wanted. The meeting broke up without an agreement, and the press at home said the President had thrown away the deal of the century over a pet project.

I'd argue the opposite, and so does the later record. Reagan had a clear view: you do not give away the one lever you have in return for a promise. Had he agreed, SDI would have been caged, and the deep cuts would have been left to the good will of a system that had not shown any. Instead, Reagan's refusal told Gorbachev that the lever was real and that the way to get rid of it was to deal on things that mattered, namely missiles.

The INF Treaty: the payoff

And that is what happened. In February 1987, Gorbachev announced that he would drop the demand that the missile talks on intermediate-range weapons be tied to an SDI deal. The path was open. On December 8, 1987, at the Washington summit, Reagan and Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. It eliminated an entire class of American and Soviet ground-launched missiles with ranges between roughly 500 and 5,500 kilometers, and it included on-site inspection. It was the first agreement that actually destroyed nuclear missiles rather than just capping how many could be built. You can read how this fit into the larger Cold War ending in Seven Myths About Reagan, Gorbachev and the End of the Cold War.

It is fair to ask how much credit SDI deserves. Historians disagree, and a careful reader should say so. Soviet economic troubles, the collapse in the price of oil in the mid-1980s, the war in Afghanistan and Gorbachev's own reformist instincts all mattered. A defender of Reagan does not need to claim SDI single-handedly ended the Cold War. The honest and defensible claim is narrower: it gave Moscow a reason to negotiate seriously, and it showed that the United States would not be bound by a treaty regime that left its people undefended. That is a strategic effect, and strategic effects count.

What SDI turned into

The grand space shield was never built. The critics were right about that, and a plain statement of it is part of an honest account. But the research did not vanish. It evolved into missile defenses that are fielded today against more limited threats, such as a small number of missiles from a rogue state, and the technology of hitting a bullet with a bullet, the idea that was mocked, has been demonstrated in many tests since, though not every test has succeeded. The United States withdrew from the ABM Treaty in 2002 under President George W. Bush, which let it build defenses the old treaty had barred. If you want to know more about how such systems are paid for and bought, read From Requirement to Runway, How the Pentagon Buys a Weapon, and for a way to read the budget numbers without being fooled, see A Worksheet for Reading Any Defense Budget Number Without Being Fooled.

One more point about the critics, said without malice. Many of them were sincere. But the pattern of the argument is worth noticing. When a conservative President proposes a bold idea, the first response is that it is impossible, the second is that it is too expensive, and the third, after it works, is that it was inevitable all along. The same pattern shows up with tax cuts, welfare reform and the Cold War itself. You will hear it again.

The bottom line

• The Strategic Defense Initiative was mocked for its nickname, but Moscow's reaction showed that the Soviet leadership took it seriously from the start.
• The critics raised real objections on cost, technology and stability, and the honest answer is that the shield as imagined was never built.
• Reagan's refusal at Reykjavik in October 1986 to confine SDI to the laboratory kept his bargaining position intact, and the INF Treaty followed on December 8, 1987.
• Defending your people is not an act of aggression. Ask the next politician who calls missile defense a fantasy why we should leave the family undefended and call that stability.
• Judge a policy by what it achieved, not by what it was nicknamed, and be wary of any argument that turns on the name.