Creating the Worlds of Star Wars: 365 Days

Star Wars Arm Wrestle During 1983, President Reagan announced the most spectacular, ambitious, elaborate, and expensive military project in world history. It was called the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), but the popular press dubbed the system “Star Wars,” after the popular George Lucas science-fiction movie of 1977. Using an orbiting weapons system, the idea was to create a shield against intercontinental ballistic missile attack by destroying incoming ICBMs before they began their descent. The weaponry was so far beyond even the foreseeable cutting edge as to be fanciful: X-ray and particle-beam devices (as yet theoretical) operated by supercomputers that had to be programmed by other computers. Critics pointed out that Star Wars was not only a violation of the 1972 ABM (antiballistic missile) treaty, but a temptation to thermonuclear war because it promised to make such a war survivable. Others suggested that the system could never be made to work, and still others protested that the staggering cost of the program—$100 to $200 billion—would permanently cripple the nation ...»