13 - The selling of SDI

Summary

The main features of SDI's marketing, to which it largely owes its budgetary success, are visible in its inaugural presentation of 23 March 1983. The President began by hinting at ‘a decision which offers a new hope for our children in the 21st century’. After a rhetorical denial, he went on to imply very powerfully that the Soviet Union was a menace and was planning to wage war. The bulk of his address catalogued frightening Soviet activities in Cuba, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Honduras, Angola, Ethiopia, South Yemen, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Poland. ‘They are spreading their military influence in ways that can directly challenge our vital interests and those of our allies’. Reagan showed aerial photographs of Soviet hardware in Nicaragua and Soviet facilities in Cuba, places whose historical connotations would automatically worry Middle America. ‘The rapid build-up of Grenada's military potential’, the President stated, ‘is unrelated to any conceivable threat to this island country’. He wished he could show more ‘without compromising our most sensitive intelligence sources and methods’.

Reagan's many statistics were selected to put the worst imaginable gloss on approximate strategic parity. He was especially disingenuous about intermediate-range nuclear missiles, but he passed it off with a grim humour: ‘So far, it seems that the Soviet definition of parity is a box score of 1,300 to nothing in their favour’.