ABSTRACT
When President Reagan officially launched the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) in his speech of March 23, 1983, it did not take the Soviet political and military leadership long to realize that this was the realization of their worst fears. The most striking aspect of the Soviet desinformatsiya campaign against SDI was its greater scope and sophistication compared to previous Soviet efforts. This chapter shows how the Soviets sought essentially to create a plausible case using US internal arguments against SDI whenever possible in their own statements. As in the past with the actual Soviet perception of all previous US strategic doctrines, the real Soviet perception of US strategy can be identified by their '"mirror-imaged" projections of Soviet strategic doctrine and cultural biases onto the mindsets of US planners and policymakers. It is reminiscent of the Soviet Union's efforts between the two world wars to establish some form of collective security arrangement within Europe.
