MILITARY SPIN-OFFS

The Strategic Defense Initiative, christened and presented as immaculate defence, has always had potential to produce spin-offs for ‘conventional’ weapons, military space weapons and anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons. The connections between SDI and related programmes officially excluded from it suggest why SDI could win support even from those who scorned Reagan's vision of perfect defences; and how SDI may be modified now its original rationale is discredited.

The crusading rhetoric about SDI was always eschewed in the restricted literature, such as the Pentagon's ‘Program Descriptive Summaries’, which spoke instead of advancing aerospace science in quite general terms: ‘the mission of the SDI is to advance aerospace science and technology, apply it to aerospace development and improvement, and plan for acquisition of qualitatively superior aerospace systems and equipment needed to accomplish the SDIO mission’. In practice SDI was intimately linked to the modernisation of the very offensive weapons which it was supposed to supersede. Table 11.1 shows ‘near term defense program areas’ which the Pentagon ‘identified as having potential for utilization of SDI technology or that may perhaps provide “spinbacks” of technology for SDI use’.

The Air Defense Initiative (ADI) was created in 1985 as an adjunct to SDI, though ADI has a much smaller budget.