U.S. News and World Report:
The people who allegedly knew better scoffed at then-President Ronald Reagan back in 1983 when he announced the United States would begin the development of a Strategic Defense Initiative that might someday neutralize the threat posed by incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles.
“You can’t hit a bullet with a bullet,” critics of the new initiative said as they tried to derail Reagan’s efforts to sell the program to a skeptical Congress. The mere idea was supposed to be destabilizing to a world where the doctrine of mutually-assured destruction kept the missiles in their silos at the tensest moments of several international crises.
Reagan stood by his guns, going so far as to walk out of a superpower summit in Reykjavik rather than kill the program as the Soviets demanded in exchange for what at the time were thought to be considerable concessions on their part.
History has proven Reagan right and naysayers wrong. Even without being fully developed, the help the nascent missile defense system provided in winning the Cold War was immeasurable. Every president since has continued to fund SDI research, keeping alive the hope that a missile shield like what was described in Reagan’s original speech might someday become a reality.
The global situation is much less stable that it was when the Berlin Wall came down, making it more vital than ever that missile defense research continue. The North Koreans have apparently developed a nuclear weapon. The Iranians are not far behind and, as the American imperative to keep them from becoming a nuclear power has shifted under President Barack Obama, it is likely they may have something to show for their efforts by the end of the decade if not sooner.
According to Lt. Gen. David L. Mann, commander of the U.S. Army’s Space Missile Defense Command, at least 22 nations currently have ballistic missile capabilities. Of those, nine are likely to also have the capacity to manufacture a nuclear weapon. ICBM’s carrying payloads intended to level a major American city or to spark an electromagnetic pulse that some scientists believe would destroy the nation’s power grid, its computers and anything else that uses electricity could now come at the United States from almost any direction. Yet the only protection against such an attack comes from a system, the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense, that is currently being starved for money….
