October 11, 2006 :: Investor’s Business Daily :: Analysis
This week marks the twentieth anniversary of President Ronald Reagan’s bold stand against trading missile defense for an arms treaty, writes Investor’s Business Daily in an editorial entitled “Reykjavik Forever.” In October 1986, during a meeting between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland, the Soviet premier unexpectedly offered an unprecedented reduction in nuclear weapons. His price was that the U.S. abandon all but the most rudimentary research on the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which Reagan had called “a new hope for our children in the 21st century.” According to contemporary accounts, Reagan gathered his papers, stood, and told Gorbachev, “No way.” Criticism and derision followed immediately. U.N. Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar compared SDI to France’s disastrous Maginot Line in World War II. In a New York Times op-ed, Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA), said “Star Wars is a physical and technological impossibility,” adding that “it is difficult to believe that any other president since World War II would have ignored the opportunity that knocked at Reykjavik.” Claiborne Pell (D-RI), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, lamented, “This is a sad day for mankind.” Yet as Investor’s Business Daily points out, “history proved the critics all wrong—including the scores of scientists who knew so much better than this simpleton who somehow landed in the White House.” In several years, Gorbachev was gone, and the Soviet Union imploded. At the time of Reagan’s death, Gennady Gerasimov, senior Soviet foreign ministry spokesman admitted that SDI had been “a very successful blackmail.”
As for SDI, Investor’s Business Daily adds that “today, U.S. interceptor missiles that can stop incoming nuclear warheads in space—Teddy Kennedy’s ‘physical and technological impossibility’—are an operational reality.” This is only partially true. The U.S. has deployed the ground-based midcourse defense system in Alaska and California, which recently intercepted a live target missile. Reagan’s vision for strategic defenses, however, has yet to come. The U.S. has not yet deployed the necessary space-based missile defense assets, such as Brilliant Pebbles, capable of targeting and destroying long-range ballistic missiles in mid-trajectory. Most of the U.S., including the East Coast, remains vulnerable to ballistic missile attack, as does the entire homeland from a ship-launched short range ballistic missile against a coastal city. On the twentieth anniversary of Reykjavik, while celebrating Reagan’s bold stand against trading away missile defense, Americans should also ask when the U.S. will implement the former President’s full vision for the strategic defense of the nation. (Article)
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