What was the goal of president reagan star wars program

It was formally scrapped by President Bill Clinton in Despite criticisms from politicians, many scientists and others that the SDI was impractical, expensive and dangerous, the concept was developed during a frightening era. The theoretical opposition to it was that it might ignite an arms race, though this does not make sense because there already was one. As much as people love to give him grief for what would end up being a trillion-dollar quagmire, or accuse him of wanting Star Wars so that the United States could have a legitimate advantage over the Soviets in a nuclear war, Reagan seemed to truly believe that ballistic missile defense could finally release us from the perpetual, enduring, soul-crushing threat of Armageddon.

But was the technology even feasible? Houghton says scientists and engineers continue to say that if they had the necessary funding, they could have made the technology happen. The study focused on the technical challenges of SDI, including developing high intensity lasers and particle beams.

In some cases, as much as a million times. An artist's concept of the Strategic Defense Initiative program called Zenith Star, space flight experiment demonstrating chemical lasers in space as a defensive weapon. Pinsker, however, claims the technology was feasible—if given enough time to develop. Among the potential components of the defense system were both space- and earth-based laser battle stations, which, by a combination of methods, would direct their killing beams toward moving Soviet targets.

Air-based missile platforms and ground-based missiles using other non-nuclear killing mechanisms would constitute the rear echelon of defense and would be concentrated around such major targets as U.

ICBM silos. The sensors to detect attacks would be based on the ground, in the air, and in space, and would use radar, optical, and infrared threat-detection systems. Reagan himself admitted that SDI could easily take until the end of the century to be put into place.

The skepticism towards the program was intense from the beginning. Besides the clear violations of the ABM treaty such a system would represent, it would also extend the arms race even deeper into space. Swarms of hunter-killer satellites and space-based lasers would be a frightening new frontier, and the Soviet Union would almost certainly try to respond in kind. The projected costs of the system ran into the hundreds of billions of dollars, and the inevitable cost overruns would balloon the Star Wars program to a huge percentage of the U.

In the event of an a nuclear attack, unproven technology would have be coordinated on an unprecedented scale and work perfectly the first time. The hurdles involved were well-nigh insurmountable. In , with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the idea was scaled back to a much more limited system capable of defending against small-scale strikes.