ABSTRACT
The hawks argue that Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) will enhance rather than endanger strategic stability. The need to provide the kind of impetus to US high technology industry that was provided by defense research and development expenditures in the period after World War II is frequently mentioned in support of the SDI. An objective case for the SDI rests in the first place on the belief that reliance on offensive nuclear weapons poses a grave menace to the United States and to the whole of humankind. The Star Wars idea appeals to a public infatuated with space exploration and the science fiction, Hollywood-produced portrait of military space warfare. From an owlish perspective, the effort to develop new defensive technologies is justified so long as it holds out a significant possibility of making nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete,” in President Reagan’s words, or even of making possible a drastic reduction in offensive arsenals.
