ABSTRACT
The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), popularly known as "Star Wars," was initiated by a 1983 presidential speech calling on scientists to free from the fear of nuclear weapons. President Ronald Reagan directed the Pentagon to search for a way to make nuclear strategic missiles impotent and obsolete. SDI discussions often ignore computers, focusing on new developments in sensors and weapons. However, the sensors will produce vast amounts of raw data that computers niust process and analyze. Computers must detect missile firings, determine the source of the attack, and compute the attacking trajectories. Democracy can only work if the public is accurately informed. Again, most of the statements made by sdio supporters seem designed to mislead the public. For example, one sdio scientist told the public that there could be 100,000 errors in the software and it would work properly.
