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Abstract
Since the post-World War II genesis of nuclear deterrence, two presidential initiatives have been presented to deliver humanity from the threat of its failure. The first was the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a constellation of space- and ground-based systems that President Ronald Reagan envisioned would render nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete.” The second is President Barack Obama's roadmap to “a world without nuclear weapons,” commonly referred to as “Global Zero.” While these proposals appear to have little in common, deeper investigation reveals a number of provocative similarities in motivation and presentation. Moreover, both generated fierce debate, often with ideological overtones, about their strategic desirability and technical feasibility. We use these parallels, as well as prominent dissimilarities, to draw lessons from the SDI experience that can be applied to the debate over Global Zero.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For constructive reviews of earlier drafts of this paper, we thank Rakesh Bahadur, Andrew Bennett, Michael Boland, Jennifer Borchard, Stephanie Culberson, Matthew Doster, Martin Hellman, Rhianna Kreger, Stephen Lukasik, Sharon Pritz, Stephen Schwartz, George Ullrich, and two anonymous reviewers. The views expressed in this paper represent those of the authors; they should not be construed as the views of the organizations with which the authors are affiliated.
Notes
1. Ronald Reagan, “Address to the Nation on Defense and National Security,” March 23, 1983, <www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1983/32383d.htm>.
2. See Paul Lettow, Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (New York: Random House, 2005), and Richard Rhodes, Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race (New York: Alfred E. Knopf, 2007), pp. 176–77.
3. Barack Obama, “Remarks by President Barack Obama,” Prague, April 5, 2009, <www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-By-President-Barack-Obama-In-Prague-As-Delivered/>. This term is not to be confused with the nonprofit organization of the same name, which espouses an identical goal but is not formally affiliated with the Obama administration.
4. Perhaps because SDI advocates later argued that the system was intended to strengthen deterrence, Reagan's original motive in building the system is often overlooked. By all accounts a genuine abolitionist, Reagan's vision was to make nuclear weapons so ineffective that they would ultimately be eliminated completely. See David Cortright and Raimo Väyrynen, Towards Nuclear Zero, Adelphi Paper 410, Routledge: 2010.
5. Reagan, “Address to the Nation on Defense and National Security.”
6. Obama, “Remarks by President Barack Obama.”
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8. See Rhodes, Arsenals of Folly, p. 175.
9. Nonnuclear analogies can be found in the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention and the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention, which have made substantial progress in eliminating such weapons worldwide.
10. In 1985, physicist Richard Garwin noted this evolution in SDI's purpose, distinguishing between its original goal—“replacing deterrence by the President's dream of an impenetrable shield”—and “the real SDI,” which offered “only the hope of strengthening deterrence by threat of retaliation.” (Emphasis in original.) See Richard L. Garwin, “Star Wars and Geneva,” speech delivered to the Foreign Press Association, September 9, 1985, <www.fas.org/rlg/850909-sdi.htm>.
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69. A running joke in the national security community at the time was that if all the Vu-Graph transparencies (this was before PowerPoint) created for the SDI program could somehow be placed into orbit, the nation would indeed enjoy an impenetrable shield.
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