A Shield in Space?: Technology, Politics, and the Strategic Defense Initiative : How the Reagan Administration Set Out to Make Nuclear Weapons impotent and Obsolete and Succumbed to the Fallacy of the Last Move

A Shield in Space? by Sanford Lakoff and Herbert F. York examines the Reagan administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), launched in 1983 and popularly dubbed “Star Wars.” Drawing on the program’s first five years, they argue SDI embodied misplaced faith in technological salvation: a politically driven shortcut that bypassed normal vetting and sidelined Defense and State. A technically uninformed president greenlit a research push to make nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete,” ho...