Back in the days of the Soviet Union, as the Free World and the Communist World stared down nuclear barrels at each other, the relative peace was kept through the embrace of a doctrine called "Mutually Assured Destruction" or MAD.
The doctrine was indeed mad because, according to the doctrine, the only thing keeping the Soviets from launching a nuclear strike against the free world they had sworn to bury was the realization that we had enough nuclear might to destroy them in turn.
This doctrine did the job, but it kept the world on edge and on hair-trigger alert for some forty years. I was in the United States Air Force during the final years of the Cold War, and occasionally guarded those alert nuclear forces. I was also there, in the winter of 1991-1992, guarding B-1 bombers as nuclear warheads were taken off the alert bombers the afternoon President George H.W. Bush took our nuclear forces off alert for the first time in decades.
But some ten years or more before the end of the Cold War and the Soviet Union, a visionary saw the possibility for something better. This visionary saw an end to the threat of nuclear annihilation under which the peoples of earth had lived for too long. This wise man believed the United States could build a defense system which could stop incoming missiles without the threat of nuclear annihilation against an enemy.
That visionary was President Ronald Reagan, and his vision was the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), or "Star Wars" as his detractors often called it.
The plan looked at a number of possible defense options including land-based missile interceptors, space-based or aircraft-mounted lasers, kinetic weapons and many others. The idea was to knock out an incoming enemy nuclear missile strike before those missiles could take out our cities, killing millions of Americans.
While liberals in the United States may have been laughing at Reagan's "Star Wars," the Soviets most assuredly were not laughing. They took SDI very seriously.
In fact, when the Americans and Soviets met in ReykjavÃk, Icleand for nuclear disarmament talks, the Soviets were adamant that Reagan must give up SDI in order for negotiations on European intermediate-range nuclear missiles.
Reagan refused to budge, and negotiations eventually broke down. However, after the Soviets saw Reagan's resolve, a treaty was eventually worked out (with the important verification necessary to ensure compliance, and large numbers of intermediate-range missiles on both sides were decommissioned. I was also fortunate enough to have a front-row seat for part of this history, working at a Ground Launched Cruise Missile (GLCM) base in England when the Soviets visited for inspections.
Many experts credit Reagan's commitment to SDI not only for a vital contribution to...
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