7 - Contexts and constituencies

Summary

Part 2 showed how SDI was established in President Reagan's first term of office. Part 3 considers how and why the programme was consolidated, under harsher conditions between 1985 and 1988. Although the interest groups still worked to consolidate the programme as a whole, they were now somewhat more fragmented, not always functioning as a totality. Different factions, with differing priorities, occasionally clashed in their efforts to shape budget priorities. The debate about the future course of SDI, especially the issue of early deployment, was, as we shall see in Chapter 9, influenced by the different interest groups struggling to mould SDI.

In Reagan's second term, confusion continued about the main purpose of SDI. The President and other ‘true believers’ continued to present the programme in hopeful, visionary tones as ‘the path to a safe and more secure future’ and ‘the most positive and promising defense program we have undertaken’. The Administration, however, increasingly justified SDI as a necessary response to Soviet activities in BMD, air defence and passive defences. The argument that SDI might defend nuclear weapons and bolster ‘deterrence’ slowly became the main rationale cited by the Administration. Since talk of ‘eliminating nuclear weapons’ was never publicly rebutted, some confusion continued.

A series of high-profile experiments gives some means of charting SDI's technical progress. In September 1985, a ground-based directed energy weapon, the Mid-Infrared Advanced Chemical Laser (MIRACL), destroyed a Titan booster.