Citation:
Date Published:
May 1, 2000Abstract:
On March 23, 1983, President Ronald Reagan shocked the national security establishment by calling upon the nation's scientific community, "who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents to the cause of mankind and world peace: to give us the means of rendering these weapons impotent and obsolete." Seventeen years have passed since that speech, and the United States has spent more than $60 billion trying to develop a defense against ballistic missiles. The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, or "Star Wars") and its successors have cost more than twice as much as the Manhattan Project (in constant dollars), but these programs have yet to produce a single workable weapon. This "achievement" is probably a record in the annals of defense procurement: never has so much been spent for so long with so little to show for it. Explaining how this happened—and why—is the main aim of Frances Fitzgerald's Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War. The "Star Wars" saga, according to Fitzgerald, is the story of how the United States came to chase a chimera. For Fitzgerald, "Star Wars" illustrates "the extent to which our national discourse about foreign and defense policy is not about reality—or the best intelligence estimates about it—but instead a matter of domestic politics, history, and mythology."