Rethinking Reagan: SDI and the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons

Twenty-eight years ago this month, President Reagan introduced the world to the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) saying that he was challenging the scientists “who gave us nuclear weapons” to “turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.”

Three and a half years later, in October 1986, Reagan is face-to-face with General Secretary Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland for an impromptu arms control summit designed to jumpstart stalled negotiations.  Over the two days of meetings, Gorbachev tells Reagan that he is willing to eliminate all Soviet offensive ballistic missiles if Reagan would do the same, but only on the condition that Reagan constrict SDI research to testing in laboratories for the next several years.  Reagan counters that SDI is just a purely defensive long-term research project and is therefore absolutely no threat to the Soviet Union.  Reagan, in fact, even offers to share SDI technology with the Soviet Union once SDI is deployed.  Gorbachev, politely, lets Reagan know that he understands his attachment to a defensive shield, but that it would be impossible for the United States to share SDI technology with the Soviet Union, continuing SDI research would likely lead to a dangerous arms race in space, and, in any case, SDI would never be perfect so Soviet missiles would easily be able to smash through the SDI shield.

The two leaders, with over 25,000 nuclear warheads apiece on the negotiating table, then break off negotiations—Reagan was unwilling to give up the possibility of immediately testing SDI in space, while Gorbachev could not agree to go home to tell his people that he agreed to both eliminate all offensive ballistic missiles and let the Americans continue their SDI program.

Reagan was immediately criticized from all sides for almost carelessly negotiating away the United States’ nuclear deterrent.  Prime Minister Thatcher even made a special visit to Washington to talk some (nuclear deterrent) sense into Reagan.  As it turned out, even though Reagan and Gorbachev would sign the sweeping INF Treaty in 1987 (eliminating intermediate range ballistic missiles), Reagan would never again seriously negotiate eliminating all offensive ballistic missiles.

Going back to the Reykjavik Summit, Reagan rationalized SDI to Gorbachev by saying that he promised the American people he would not give up the chance to build a defense to a nuclear attack, and he probably honestly meant it.  But there had to be more to the story, because if SDI was purely defensive, as Reagan told Gorbachev, where is the sufficient deterrent such that any state contemplating a war with the United States would immediately realize that their losses would be unacceptable?  After all, a state with only a defensive system is not a threat because all that it can do is knock down missiles, not actually attack military infrastructure or other land-based targets, and according to Reagan, he would have been willing to eliminate all offensive ballistic missiles once SDI was deployed.

One possibility, it logically follows, is that Reagan was secretly developing a new class of offensive weapons to replace ballistic missiles, and that the deployment of this new weapon would coincide with the deployment of SDI.  If this is the case, and newly released documents from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library responsive to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request I filed in 2002 support this suggestion, Reagan was actively using SDI as a cover for a program originally called Excaliber, the brainchild of Dr. Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb.  The existence of Dr. Teller’s research on Excaliber, which involved a laser in space that would be pumped by a nuclear detonation towards a land-based target capable of destroying the target within seconds, is not unknown (and has been extensively studied), but historians have been unsure of the connection between SDI and Excaliber, and the extent to which Dr. Teller’s warnings to President Reagan about the dangers of losing the race to weaponize space to the Soviets actually resonated with the President. 

Evidence for the claim that Reagan was using SDI as a cover for Excaliber comes from a newly released June 11, 1985 memo written by Dr. Keyworth (President Reagan’s White House Science Adviser) to chief of staff Donald Regan, in anticipation of Teller’s visit with Reagan that afternoon.  Keyworth, a protégé of Teller, informs the new chief of staff that Teller will be meeting with the President that afternoon to discuss SDI related accomplishments, “keying on the bomb-pumped laser.”  Keyworth, however, fears that his old mentor “will largely dwell on tentative developments in the bomb-pumped x-ray laser, or ‘Excaliber.’”  “If Excaliber were to work as advertised it would be an incredible weapon,” Keyworth continues.  “[Teller] may also make the case that while the Soviets are working on this bomb-pumped x-ray technology, we are not.  In fact, we are funding investigation of this technology through DOE (Department of Energy).  [Teller’s] difficulty is that we have not made it centerpiece option within the SDI.”

“Were it to work (its feasibility is uncertain),” Keyworth continues, “this device would be a powerful preemptive attack weapon—and destabilizing.  It therefore tends to run counter to the spirit of the President’s SDI, as well as the capabilities of all other technologies now under development by the SDIO which can only be effectively used in a defensive mode.  For this reason, and because it is nuclear, we have deliberately kept this program out of SDI’s limelight.”

The controversy over the extent to which President Reagan believed SDI was purely for defensive purposes will no doubt continue for some time.  But, with the release of more and more once secret documents from the Reagan era, it is time to look at SDI in a new light, and recognize that Reagan was not about to eliminate nuclear weapons unless the United States could first replace the nuclear deterrent with some other form of sufficient deterrent.  SDI, in itself, would not have accomplished as much, but SDI combined with another form of offensive weapon probably would have guaranteed U.S. security at least to the same extent as nuclear deterrence.  If that were the case—Excaliber being deployed along with SDI—it would explain why Reagan chose to protect a long-term research program that required immediate space-based testing over reducing and perhaps eliminating the threat of nuclear war with the Soviet Union.

For those interested in further research on SDI, I suggest a visit to my website, http://www.thereaganfiles.com, on which I created a new link containing hundreds of pages of newly released documents responsive to my 2002 FOIA request on SDI.