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

Reagan spent what he believed were the best years of his life in Hollywood and forever after drew on his experiences in the film community for ideas and inspiration. He became an anti-Communist because of clashes with the Communists in the film industry. When he returned to Washington from Geneva in 1985 after meeting with the new Soviet leader, Gorbachev, Reagan compared arms-control negotiations with the Soviets to labor negotiations with movie producers when he was president of the Screen Actors Guild. Long after he had left Hollywood for the political stage, Reagan recalled the plots of his films, including the Bancroft series, and used them for anecdotes or analogies.

Reagan also had an avid interest in science fiction that began in the 1940s and endured throughout his presidency. The genre was preoccupied, particularly after Hiroshima, with fantastic weapons and interplanetary interventions to save the world from nuclear destruction. Reagan was a dreamer with an interest in world peace that prompted him to join the United World Federalists in 1945. He was a fan of the classic 1951 film, The Day the Earth Stood Still, in which an alien hero, played by Michael Rennie, comes to earth as an envoy from an advanced civilization that has curbed its warlike tendencies and uses an interplanetary police force of robots to destroy nations that resort to war. Rennie's civilization fears that earthlings will discover space travel and spread nuclear war into the galaxy. The alien's mission is to warn the nations of Earth to work together in peace or face destruction by the robotic police force-a decision left unresolved at film's end. Colin Powell believes that Reagan's proposal to share the fruits of SDI research with the Soviets derived from The Day the Earth Stood Still. The national- security community was aghast at the idea.

Missile defense was not on the nation's radar screen during the Reagan administration's early years. Reagan was out of commission for months after he was shot and nearly killed by a would-be assassin on March 30, 1981, and he focused on economic issues rather than foreign affairs when he returned to action. Until Gorbachev came along, he showed no interest in engaging any of a series of ailing Soviet leaders. But Reagan did put the United States in a position to negotiate from strength by carrying out his campaign promise to increase military spending in what he said was a response to a continuing Soviet arms buildup. The U.S. increase in military spending was grist for the growing nuclear-freeze movement, which blamed Reagan for escalating U.S.-Soviet tensions. Few freeze advocates would have believed that Reagan saw the buildup as a means to the end of abolishing nuclear weapons.

The doctrine of deterrence had been in place for so long when Reagan took office that it seemed permanent. With few exceptions, the Left and Right shared the premises of deterrence, while disagreeing on the nature of the principal threat to peace. Arms-control professionals sought parity between the U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals but always at higher levels than before. The Soviets were then building powerful intercontinental ballistic missiles with multiple warheads at a pace that outstripped U.S. capabilities. The land-based component of the U.S. response to the buildup was the MX missile that President Carter had courageously endorsed over opposition within his own party. But Carter and defense secretary Harold Brown could not win congressional approval of an MX basing system, and Reagan and his own defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, ran into the same problem. Renaming the MX the "Peacekeeper," as Reagan did, was no help. On December 7, 1982, the House stripped MX funds from the budget, setting in motion a chain of events that led to SDI.