Two years into his first term Ronald Reagan, in his own handwriting, added a personal challenge to a drab speech text. To the scientists who'd created A-bombs and H-bombs he said: "give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete."
The "Star Wars" missile defense echoed a Reagan movie role 40 years earlier: he played an American agent with an "Inertia Projector" that could paralyze enemy planes on approach. Better yet, the Star Wars shield idea hinted at a break from the MAD policy of deterrence.
Mutually Assured Destruction was no defense; just a promise that we'd do to them what they did to us. Star Wars would protect American people, not avenge them. Most of 20 years and some $60-billion dollars later, there's only one problem with the nuclear umbrella: no one this side of Buck Rogers can imagine how it would work.
Frances Fitzgerald's chronicle of a defense fantasy ("Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan and Star Wars and the End of the Cold War") that won't die in this hour of The Connection. (Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
