ABSTRACT
The perceived importance of augmenting alliance air defense assets as a priority North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) concern has awakened West European interest in the potential theater applications of Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)-derived technologies. Europeans focus on the air-defense-related potential for SDI spinoffs. European participation in the American research program is likely to increase, given the growing perception of the conventional defense spinoffs from SDI. Critics argued that the United States sought strategic superiority over the Soviet Union by means of SDI. The immediate stimulus underlying a rekindling of the NATO air defense debate was the modernization of Soviet tactical surface-to-surface missiles, some of which display an endoatmospheric trajectory. In Western Europe the perception that SDI does not explicitly pertain to theater defense issues gave rise to a proliferation of regional concepts—the European Defense Initiative being perhaps the most famous.
