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Reagan's Big Idea - Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative

National Review, Feb 22, 1999 by Lou Cannon

How the Gipper conceived Star Wars.

On the eve of Ronald Reagan's election as fortieth president of the United States, a reporter asked him what Americans saw in him. Reagan hesitated, then replied, "Would you laugh if I told you that I think, maybe, they see themselves and that I'm one of them? I've never been able to detach myself or think that I, somehow, am apart from them."

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No one laughed. Reagan was popular with the working press, and reporters found it neither immodest of him nor newsworthy that he saw himself as national Everyman. While many in the campaign press corps had from time to time been appalled by Reagan's knowledge gaps, they had also been impressed by his consistent ability to connect with the people. Reagan was then 69 years old and secure in this connection. His bond with his fellow Americans was a gift that had been nourished in Illinois and Iowa and polished in Hollywood and on the campaign trail. "Reagan's solutions to problems were always the same as the guy in the bar," said his political strategist, Stu Spencer. Walter Lippmann once wrote that the greatness of de Gaulle was not that he was in France but that France was in him. In the same sense, America was in Ronald Reagan.

A recognition that Reagan, while in many ways exceptional, was in truth an ordinary American helps explain his interest in the vision that became the Strategic Defense Initiative or Star Wars. (The "Star Wars" label, while intended derisively, did not harm the missile-defense cause. In the movie trilogy, as Richard Perle observed, "the good guys won.") Reagan shared not only the common sense of the "guy in the bar" but his innocence, and to some extent his ignorance of strategic issues in the nuclear age. Ordinary Americans rarely dwell on calamities too awful to contemplate such as the grim reality that the precarious peace called the Cold War was preserved by fear of mutual annihilation. After Reagan proposed SDI, polls showed that most Americans had assumed the United States possessed some defense against nuclear missiles, other than the threat of wiping out those who launched them. They were horrified, as Reagan had been, when they learned otherwise.

Running for governor of California in 1966, Reagan often said that "there are simple answers, just not easy ones." But there is no simple or single explanation for Reagan's fascination with SDI. His advocacy of missile defense was a distillation of many factors: religious beliefs that interpreted the Biblical story of Armageddon as a prophecy of nuclear war; a role in a movie as a government agent who thwarts the theft of a defensive death ray; a lifelong interest in science fiction; an enduring belief in American technological know-how; and an optimistic yearning for a benign alternative to the threat of nuclear war. It is difficult to identify the primary ingredient in this stew, but I suspect it was Reagan's revulsion at the idea of mutual assured destruction. Reagan is a moral man and MAD is immoral, however effective it was in deterring Soviet aggression in the decades after World War II. "It's like you and me sitting here in a discussion where we are each pointing a loaded gun at each other, and if you say anything wrong or I say anything wrong, we're going to pull the trigger," Reagan told me in a 1989 interview when I was working on my third book about him. "And I just thought this was ridiculous-mutual assured destruction. It really was a mad policy."

It is not clear when Reagan came to this view. The conventional opinion, compellingly put forth by Martin Anderson in his 1988 book, Revolution, is that Reagan's epiphany occurred during a July 31, 1979, visit to the headquarters of the North American Aerospace Defense Command at Cheyenne Mountain, Wyoming, when Air Force general James Hill explained that nothing could be done if the Soviets fired a missile at a U.S. city, aside from a few minutes' warning. According to Anderson, who accompanied him, Reagan was shocked. "We have spent all that money and have all that equipment and there is nothing we can do to prevent a nuclear missile from hitting us," he said on the flight back to Los Angeles.

Anderson is a reliable witness, but Reagan had also expressed concern about mutual assured destruction during his near-miss attempt to win the Republican presidential nomination in 1976. And he may have had even earlier qualms. In 1967, Gov. Reagan attended a briefing on defensive technologies at the invitation of physicist Edward Teller, who recalled in 1990 that Reagan had asked "good and fundamental questions" about nuclear policy. Reagan did not then go on record as favoring missile defense, but he was impressed by Teller, and it is quite possible that this briefing planted the seeds of an alternative doctrine to MAD.

Garry Wills and others have suggested that the seeds of SDI were planted in Reagan's head by a 1940 film, Murder in the Air, the last and best of four low-budget potboilers featuring Reagan as Secret Service agent Brass Bancroft. In the movie, Bancroft thwarts a spy who is trying to steal the "inertia projector," which could shoot planes out of the sky from a distance before they could bomb the United States. As the film described it, this "new superweapon not only makes the United States invincible, but in so doing promises to become the greatest force for world peace ever discovered." Bancroft finds the stolen projector and uses it to down the plane in which the spy is trying to take the plans for the device to an unnamed enemy.

Reagan's Big Idea - Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative

National Review, Feb 22, 1999 by Lou Cannon

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