Max Boot
In 1983, President Ronald Reagan announced he was launching a Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as “Star Wars,” with the goal of rendering nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete.” He imagined lasers in space shooting down Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles, effectively creating a space shield to save America from nuclear Armageddon.
More than 40 years and hundreds of billions of dollars in missile-defense spending later, the United States has not come close to achieving Reagan’s lofty aspirations. Space lasers did not prove practical. Neither did a madcap scheme known as Brilliant Pebbles for lofting thousands of interceptors into space. The Airborne Laser — a Boeing 747 equipped with a laser — got to the testing phase before being canceled as too impractical.
The United States did develop and deploy effective defenses, such as the Patriot battery and the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system, for use against short- and medium-range missiles. But attempts to stop a nuclear missile strike on the United States have never advanced much beyond President George W. Bush’s deployment in 2004 of 44 ground-based interceptors in Alaska and California. This system was designed to defend against a few missiles launched by a rogue state, not a massive nuclear attack from Russia or China. And it isn’t clear the system could achieve even that objective: In tests, the interceptors hit their targets only 50 percent of the time.
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