Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War

Chapter One: The American Everyman

On March 23, 1983, President Reagan announced that after consultations with the Joint Chiefs of Staff he had decided to embark on a long-range research-and-development effort to counter the threat of Soviet ballistic missiles and to make these nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete." The announcement, made in an insert into a routine defense speech, came as a surprise to everyone in Washington except for a handful of White House aides. The insert had not been cleared with the Pentagon, and although Reagan was proposing to overturn the doctrine which had ruled U.S. nuclear strategy for more than three decades, the secretary of defense and the secretary of state were informed only a day or so before the speech was broadcast.

In background briefings White House aides explained that the research effort would be directed towards producing space-borne laser and particle-beam weapons with the potential to provide a reliable defense for the entire United States. Most of the scientists and defense experts invited to the White House for dinner that evening expressed incredulity: the technologies were so futuristic they would not be ready for decades, if then, and the cost of an all-out development effort would be staggering. Some further objected that any effort to develop an anti-ballistic missile capability would lead to a new and more dangerous form of arms race with the Soviet Union.

Reagan's proposal was so vague and so speculative that it was not taken altogether seriously at the time. Press attention soon shifted away from it and did not fully return until March 1985, when the administration launched the Strategic Defense Initiative with fanfare and asked the Congress to appropriate twenty-six billion dollars for it over the next five years.

At this point the debate over anti-missile defenses began in earnest, and journalists for the first time inquired about the origins of the proposal that Reagan had made so abruptly two years before. The President maintained that the idea was his to begin with, but said nothing more about it. However, Martin Anderson, an economist at the Hoover Institution and a former Reagan aide for domestic policy, told journalists that the idea had first come to Reagan during a visit to the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) that he had made at the beginning of his presidential campaign in July 1979. In his book Revolution, published in 1988, Anderson described that visit at some length. His account subsequently became embedded in the history of the Strategic Defense Initiative. Journalists, academics and official SDI historians have all quoted it in more or less detail -- and small wonder, for it is a marvelous story. To paraphrase Anderson's text, it is this:

On July 31, 1979, Anderson accompanied Reagan from Los Angeles to the NORAD base in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado. The visit had been arranged by a Hollywood screenwriter and producer, Douglas Morrow, whom Reagan had known for some years, and Morrow came along on the trip. NORAD, Anderson explains, "is the nerve center of a far-flung, world-wide network of radar detectors that alerts us to any surprise attack." Its computers, he writes, would track a Soviet missile from its launch pad and give the President the facts he would have to rely on in deciding whether to launch a retaliatory strike. As for the command post, it is "a vast underground city, a multi-level maze of rooms and corridors carved deep into the solid granite core of Cheyenne Mountain," with "a massive steel door several feet thick." Once inside these portals, the visitors spent most of the day in a series of windowless conference rooms listening to briefings on the nuclear capabilities of the U.S. and the Soviet Union and on the means for detecting a nuclear attack.