A winning Cold War weapon

President Reagan announced the Strategic Defence Initiative in 1983. It was never built. It never needed to be.

What won the argument was the artwork. Lockheed and Boeing produced glossy renderings of orbital battle stations, X-ray lasers, particle beam weapons, railguns hurling projectiles through space. None of it existed in deployable form. But all of it looked plausible enough to matter.

The Soviets had no answer to the pictures. Their own weapons programmes were real, in the sense that missiles had been built, as had ships, submarines and tanks, and budgets had been spent. But their graphics departments could not compete with Hollywood-trained American illustrators selling a vision of the High Frontier. The Heritage Foundation pushed a huge manual on how it would work to end the military stalemate that Mutual Assured Destruction had engendered. A ‘graphics gap’ opened alongside the missile gap and the bomber gap, and this one the Soviets could neither close nor afford to ignore.

Left-wingers in the West leapt to denounce it as a first-strike weapon, in the same sense that a shield is a first-strike weapon against a sword. They said it would threaten the Nuclear Peace. Other left-wingers, and sometimes the same ones, also denounced it as fantasy, impractical, unfeasible, and unaffordable.

At Reykjavik in 1986, Gorbachev made SDI's abandonment his central demand. Reagan refused. He had been briefed, partly on intelligence reaching him through the defector Oleg Gordievsky, that the Kremlin's fear of the programme exceeded any realistic assessment of what it could do. A weapon that exists mainly as a threat works exactly as well as the target believes it does. The Soviets believed it completely.

Five years later the Soviet empire was gone. No missile shield had been built. No X-ray laser had fired a shot in anger. The pictures alone had done the work: they forced Moscow into a spending race against a technology that was, in large part, a rendering of images.

The lesson survives the Cold War. Deterrence is a psychological state, not an engineering achievement. A regime bankrupting itself to match an illustration has already lost the argument.

Madsen Pirie