6 - ‘Star Wars’ and technological determinism

Summary

Introduction

This chapter revisits the arguments surrounding the Reagan administration's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). It makes the case that the instrumentalist justifications for SDI examined in chapter 5 were themselves only made possible by the use and integration of substantivist framings of the nuclear threat. To show this, the chapter examines the context in which the Reagan administration came to power. In particular it focuses on how the intelligence revisions proposed by reports from ‘Team B’ and the ‘Committee on the Present Danger’ foreshadowed the Reagan administration's increased defence restructuring by invoking a quasi-substantivist logic. This restructuring, in turn, led to a purer, more thoroughgoing form of substantivist critique by the political left, which seriously threatened the Reagan administration's commitment to defence spending. Reagan's argument for SDI, particularly his March 1983 presidential appeal, sought to co-opt this latter impulse and to build it into the case for strategic defence, and in conclusion the chapter employs Gramsci's notion of transformismo as a means of understanding how this co-optation occurred. As a consequence of this co-optation of substantivist arguments, it is argued, the justification of SDI was based not purely on instrumentalism but rather on a familiar common sense of technology in which potentially contradictory elements of instrumental and substantive understandings of technology formed a ‘heteroglossic’ composite.

Détente and its discontents

In Part Two we saw how proponents of missile defence such as Edward Teller and General Daniel Graham, having been dealt a major blow by the 1972 ABM Treaty, refocused their efforts on persuading subsequent US policy-makers of the viability of a range of ‘exotic’ defence proposals.