ABSTRACT
In 1983 President Ronald Reagan announced his goal of eliminating the threat posed by strategic nuclear missiles and called on the scientific community to make these nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete." As the scope of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) program has expanded, the goal of the program has become less clear. SDI would seek to achieve very high levels of attrition by a layered defense. Such ideas include spinning boosters, shields, and coatings to reduce, at relatively low cost, the effectiveness of directed energy systems against the vulnerable booster. The decisive argument against the crash program, however, is the extremely dangerous impact it would have on the stability of the US-Soviet strategic military relationship. Both the United States and the Soviet Union know that neither could initiate a strategic nuclear attack against the other side without themselves being destroyed as a society by the inevitable retaliation.
