The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), also known as “Star Wars,” was a ballistic missile defense program launched by President Reagan in 1983. It spent $25 billion on research and testing but never achieved its goal of producing a reliable anti-missile system. SDI was terminated in 1993 and replaced by the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, which focused on regional rather than national missile defense. The program led to technological spinoffs, but detractors argue that the money could have been better spent on individually targeted projects. US national missile defense research continues today, but a highly effective anti-missile system has not yet been produced.
The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was a national ballistic missile defense program for the United States launched by a speech by President Ronald Reagan on March 23, 1983. Reagan said, “I call on the scientific community that gave us nuclear weapons to transform their great talents to the cause of humanity and world peace: to give us the means to render these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete”. This has been referred to as the “Star Wars” talk, as it was initially decried as science fiction and a waste of money. The SDI eventually became known colloquially as Star Wars.
SDI was terminated in 1993 by President Bill Clinton and replaced by the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO), placing greater emphasis on regional rather than national missile defense. Over 10 years, the Strategic Defense Initiative spent $25 billion on research and testing, but it never achieved its goal of producing a reliable anti-missile system. Whether SDI should ever have been launched was an extremely controversial and politicized topic at the time, and continues to be so today.
The initial impetus for SDI was when Reagan heard that a scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Peter L. Hagelstein, had designed an X-ray laser powered by a nuclear explosion. National strategists have imagined a curtain of such lasers, initially mounted on missiles, then on satellites, as an impenetrable wall to stop any incoming ballistic missiles. However, when this project was actually tested, just three days after the Star Wars talk, it was a total failure.
But SDI was not just about X-ray laser design, and a number of other approaches were considered and studied over the next decade. The MIRACL (Mid-Infrared Advanced Chemical Laser) chemical laser was built in 1985 and used to successfully shoot down a Titan booster during a test. Investigations into hypervelocity rail guns have led to improvements in the technology, but nothing that could have prevented an incoming swarm of Soviet missiles. A system of watermelon-sized mini-missiles called Brilliant Pebbles has been called “the crowning achievement of the Strategic Defense Initiative,” although it was never deployed and the project was canceled in 1994.
Modern opinion of SDI’s success is mixed. Backers say the program has led to many major technology spinoffs, such as battle lasers and cameras for satellites. Some even go so far as to say that the collapse of the Soviet Union can be attributed to fear of the SDI. Detractors say the entire program was unfeasible from the start and that the money would have been better spent on individually targeted projects outside the auspices of a missile defense program. US national missile defense research continues today and tests have shown limited success. At best, such systems would likely shoot down no more than a few dozen missiles, whereas in an actual nuclear war, hundreds if not thousands of nuclear missiles would be fired. Maybe the research will eventually produce a highly effective anti-missile system, but that day hasn’t come yet.
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