released in a nuclear explosion might be harnessed to “pump” a laser, which could in turn be directed “in a straight line over great distances to strike a target.” It was an intriguing idea to Keyworth, one that he relayed to Reagan, saying that it represented a potential breakthrough which could “represent a means” enabling nuclear weapons to be used defensively rather than offensively. In Keyworth’s memo briefing the president on this development, Reagan in turn scribbled a note to Bill Clark: “Dear Bill, We should take this seriously and have a real look. Remember our country once turned down the submarine. Ron.”42
Another event pivotal in Reagan’s early thinking was a July 1979 visit to the North American Aerospace Defense Command inside Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado. When Reagan asked what would happen to the enormously sophisticated, well-fortified complex if a Soviet SS-18 landed 100 yards outside, Commanding General James Hill snapped, “It would blow us away.” According to Reagan adviser Martin Anderson, Reagan at that moment was deeply disturbed that America had no means to defend against such an attack. “There must be something better than this,” he demanded.43
This concern was fueled even further when as a newly sworn-in president he was shocked by a classified Defense Department briefing which stated that at least 150 million Americans would be killed in a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, even if America “won.” For Americans who survived such a war, said Reagan, he could not imagine what life would be like. Even if a nuclear war did not mean human extinction, it would mean the end of civilization as the world knew it. “No one could ‘win’ a nuclear war,” insisted Reagan. “Yet as long as nuclear weapons were in existence, there would always be risks they would be used…. My dream, then, became a world free of nuclear weapons.”44
Despite Reagan’s hawkish reputation, he detested nuclear weapons.45 “With every ounce of my being,” he said in 1983, “I pray the day will come when nuclear weapons no longer exist anywhere on Earth.”46 He asserted that nuclear war would be the “greatest tragedy… ever experienced by mankind, in the history of mankind.” He insisted that, “No room should be left for doubt about a nuclear exchange; no one would win.”47 Once, he rhetorically asked a British television correspondent: “Where do we live after we have poisoned the Earth?”48 These were points that he echoed routinely, and yet they have largely been forgotten.49 Indeed, among Reagan’s chief second-guessers, no less than Time’s Strobe Talbott described him as a “nuclear abolitionist.”50
For these reasons, Reagan was uncomfortable with Mutually Assured Destruction, or “MAD,” a doctrine devised by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in the 1960s. MAD posited that the frightening specter of tens of thousands of American and Soviet nuclear warheads was, strangely, a good thing: it ensured that neither side would launch missiles because doing so would mutually assure global destruction. As a result, said McNamara, not unreasonably, leaders on both sides would be extremely careful to never push the button. In that ironic way, these vast arsenals were a stabilizing presence.
Reagan was appalled by this thinking. As George Shultz notes, he believed that relying on MAD for deterrence was “morally abhorrent.”51 “MAD spells what it is—it’s really mad,” Reagan insisted.52 A grim example of “the madness of the MAD policy,” said Reagan, was a situation in which a president had “six minutes to decide how to respond to a blip on a radar scope and decide whether to unleash Armageddon!”53 Reagan said that, “People who put their trust in MAD must trust it to work 100 percent—forever, no slip-ups, no mistakes.” It also depended on no madmen and no unmanageable crisis. He often noted that if even one missile was accidentally fired at the United States, the president had no way to prevent the “wholesale destruction” of American lives and the only recourse would be a retaliation that would wipe out millions of lives on the other side. This position was “simply morally untenable.”54
Instead Reagan preferred to rely on what he called “mutual assured survival”—which he hoped might be possible via missile defense.55 SDI, then, would be a “noble enterprise to find an alternative to nuclear terror.”56 As Ed Meese noted, Reagan’s idea was a shrewd way of responding to the fears of nuclear war—which the Soviets and Western leftists were blaming on Reagan—with an option to diminish nuclear war.57 Reagan drew leftists into a corner, daring them to violate their own slogans. As arms-control director Ken Adelman put it, it was ironic that liberals, who prided themselves on their humanity, advocated such a blood-curdling approach as MAD, which essentially said that all was well so long as both superpowers held the potential to vaporize hundreds of millions of people.58
For those not reassured by such a prospect, said Reagan, “we must ask: isn’t it time to begin curing the world of this nuclear threat? If we have the medicine, can we in good conscience hold out on the patients? I believe that, given the gravity of the nuclear threat to humanity, any unnecessary delay in the development and deployment of SDI is unconscionable.”59 SDI, he assured, provided hope—a potential lifesaving alternative.
Aside from MAD, there was another crucial but neglected motivation in Reagan’s pursuit of SDI: The Soviets had invested in their own defense system, a point Reagan made directly to the Soviets. He called the Soviet missiledefense effort the “Red Shield”:
It’s no longer a secret that the Soviet Union has spent billions upon billions of dollars developing and deploying their own antiballistic missile defenses. Research and development in some parts of the Soviet strategic defense program—we call it the Red Shield—began more than 15 years ago. Today Soviet capabilities include everything from killer satellites to the modernized ABM defenses that ring Moscow. More than 10,000 Soviet scientists and engineers are working on military lasers alone, with thousands more developing other advanced technologies, such as particle beam and kinetic energy weapons. The Red Shield program actually dwarfs our SDI.60
This was not some Reagan fantasy. The Soviets had in fact been investing in missile defense for years, a point Reagan made often, but with no impact on the American media. Reagan hoped the “Red Shield” phrase would stick; it never did.61 The press failed to make an issue of the Soviet program, no matter how often Reagan raised it.
“IMPENETRABLE SHIELD”
While the “Red Shield” phrase did not enter the public consciousness, other, less helpful phrases did, proving detrimental to certain perceptions of the program. One such phrase was “impenetrable shield,” an expression which became associated with the plan soon after the March 23 speech. Contrary to popular criticism, Reagan did not propose SDI as an impenetrable shield that could be rapidly installed. His diary entry from the evening of the SDI speech reads: “I made no optimistic forecasts—said it might take 20 years or more but we had to do it.”62 A comparison of Reagan’s various statements, along with a careful read of his original speech proposing SDI, suggests that he believed SDI was technologically possible, but not in the near future. As he said that March 23, “Current technology has attained a level of sophistication where it’s reasonable to begin this effort.”
An SDI might not achieve a 100 percent kill rate against 10,000 Soviet missiles raining over America; yet, a system might be developed that could take down a nuclear warhead launched via a Middle East “madman” or a “trigger-happy general” or a “slip up.” Reagan turned this criticism on liberals: “They say it won’t be 100% effective, which is odd, since they don’t ask for 100% effectiveness in their social experiments.”63 George Keyworth was also greatly troubled with the perception that the administration was seeking to create a perfect shield. That image, said Keyworth, was “the toughest piece of propaganda we had to deal with.”64 It was always the biggest obstacle to SDI.
Actually, the media was partly responsible for the perception. Reagan aide David Gergen remembers the colorful video animation used by TV networks when they reported on SDI: perfectly narrowed lasers emanating from spacebased platforms flawlessly neutralized onslaughts of Soviet ICBMs. The White House communications office did not create those exaggerated images. Ironically, the fictional images augmented SDI’s status in the eyes of the American public and quite possibly Soviet officials.65
This is not to suggest that Reagan bears no responsibility for the misperception. He stated that SDI could someday “render nuclear weapons obsolete.” Reagan envisioned an advanced system decades down the road, but
