Reagan vindicated: SDI works

Reagan's SDI was a very successful blackmail. … The Soviet Union tried to keep up pace with the U.S. military buildup, but the Soviet economy couldn't endure such competition.

~ Gennady Gerasimov, senior Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman

It was a cold, brisk autumn day in 1985. I had just finished my classes at the University of Michigan and had rushed home to my dorm to wind down and watch a little TV when I saw this regal figure stroll confidently down the stairs of this magnificent mansion without a coat and with an extended hand of friendship to his Russian counterpart, who was covered from head-to-toe with winter attire looking very uncomfortable. Who was this man? This was President Reagan at the Chateau Fleur d'Eau just outside of Geneva – the prologue to the Reykjavik summit a year later.

This was my first introduction to President Ronald Wilson Reagan. Three years later, as my disenchantment with liberalism grew and in reaction to my militant feminist colleagues while a graduate student at Harvard, I became a conservative. Since I couldn't vote for Reagan (he had just left office) in 1989, I gladly cast my first vote for Reagan's successor – George H. W. Bush.

Fast forward to today when on Feb. 20 the world sat stunned as it watched a modified SM-3 missile launched from the USS Lake Erie intercept the NROL-21 satellite before it could de-orbit naturally. This wasn't merely a virtuosic display of rocket science, but a magnificent vindication of the singular vision by one of our greatest American presidents in modern times – Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative program, or SDI.

In a wonderful review by the Hoover Institute of Mark Davis' book, "Reagan's Real Reason for SDI" (2000) the reviewer wrote:

Ronald Reagan soldiered on before audiences indifferent to his ideas, speaking in idealistic ways that would be dismissed as infantile goo-gooism if uttered by a president today. In an August 1985 press conference, he asserted that such a defense should go beyond protecting America and protect "the people of this planet." In a September press conference, he spoke more explicitly:

"I'm sorry that anyone ever used the appellation Star Wars for it because it isn't that. It is purely to see if we can find a defensive weapon so that we can get rid of the idea that our deterrence should be the threat of retaliation, whether from the Russians toward us or us toward them, of the slaughter of millions of people by way of nuclear weapons."

U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev had that critical nuclear-arms-control summit at the famous house of Höfði in Reykjavík, the capital city of Iceland, on Oct. 11-12, 1986.

Why did the initial talks at Reykjavik collapse? Although in 1986 Reagan had proposed banning all ballistic missiles, he rigidly insisted on continuing research on the Strategic Defense Initiative that could potentially be shared with the Soviets. Yet, despite the U.S. promise to share this technology, Soviet hatred and fear of SDI was a cause celebre to the party bosses of the Soviet Union as well as American leftists of all varieties, thus negatively impacting the already volatile U.S.-Soviet relations – a geopolitical meltdown further exacerbated by the failure of the 1985 Geneva Summit and by the Daniloff-Zakharov espionage affair.

The Reykjavik discussions languished due to Gorbachev's insistence on linking the SDI program to any agreement on eliminating INF missiles in Europe and reducing NATO tactical nuclear weapons and Warsaw Pact conventional forces, but especially because of Reagan's insistence that SDI research be unnegotiable. Although the meeting adjourned with no agreement, history has vindicated Reagan's shrewd diplomacy, for it led directly to the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in Washington, D.C., Dec. 8, 1987.

As a young graduate student in the late 1980s, I had a moderate but growing interest in politics and therefore could appreciate the far-reaching geopolitical considerations of America having some defense against a nuclear attack by our sworn enemy, the Soviet Union, yet I heard little support of Reagan's SDI program here in America. Instead, I heard almost unanimous vitriol by the Democrats, the propaganda press, the academy, my fellow students at Harvard and of course the anti-war left. They all mocked Reagan as a "warmonger," "a simple man," "naïve," "intransigent" and derided his SDI program as "Star Wars."

Twenty years later history has aptly praised Reagan and vilified the myopic vision of the left in regards to nuclear arms policy.

Conservative icon Rush Limbaugh, in a moving tribute to Reagan on June 7, 2004, made the following remarks about Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative:

I attended a lecture given by Lady Margaret Thatcher at the Waldorf in New York. She made a point of saying it was Reagan, not Gorbachev, who brought down the Soviet Union primarily by proposing SDI. It was at that moment that Gorbachev knew it was over because he knew we Americans could do SDI and his country couldn't.

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But back then, SDI was regarded much as the whole war in Iraq is today. SDI was treated as a joke; SDI was dangerous; SDI was going to blow up the world; SDI was impossible. It was typical liberalism: greatness couldn't be done. Greatness can't happen. "This is only going to kill us all! This is just the meanderings of a B-actor." I mean, you people have forgotten how absolutely mean-spirited the critics of Reagan were about him and to him personally.

[Reagan] never flinched, never cared. He smiled at it. … She stood up and went through this list of things and made the point that it was at that moment Mikhail Gorbachev realized it was over because he couldn't keep up. His country couldn't do it, and he knew Americans could create SDI. …

Since its conception in 1983, our enemies have been terrified that Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative will work. If you think I write from hyperbole, ask yourself what countries are most intimidated by this technology? That's right – China and Russia, our two closest militarily competitors. These countries have been literally apoplectic since the U.S. shot down that satellite with a rocket last month. Their worst fears are realized. SDI is a success! From a geopolitical standpoint, these aggressor nations cannot as effectively threaten America or our allies with impunity as they could absent SDI technology.

Thank you, President Ronald Reagan.

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