Weapons in Space: Technology, Politics, and the Rise and Fall of the Strategic Defense Initiative

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In Weapons in Space: Technology, Politics, and the Rise and Fall of the Strategic Defense Initiative, Aaron Bateman, assistant professor of history and international affairs at The George Washington University and a member of the university’s Space Policy Institute, distills recently declassified U.S., Soviet, and United Kingdom records to provide new insights into the origins, history, and legacy of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Born of President Ronald Reagan’s desire to render nuclear weapons obsolete, SDI was a family of programs aimed at protecting the United States from nuclear attack. Most studies of SDI have focused on the geopolitical aspects of the program—in particular, concerns that an effective strategic missile defense could upset the nuclear posture of the Cold War superpowers in unpredictable and dangerous ways. Bateman approaches SDI from a different angle, by exploring the many ways that political decisions about SDI were entangled in challenges and choices about space technology.

The most prominent entanglement of SDI (as evidenced by the book title) is the similarity of the technology that both ballistic missile defenses and offensive space weapons rely. In chapter 1 (“The Rise and Fall of Détente on Earth and in Space”), Bateman surveys the intertwined technical history of missile and missile defense programs and of satellite programs and antisatellite (ASAT) programs, from the 1960s through the election of Reagan. Many readers will be surprised to learn that ASATs were a spin-off from the earliest missile defense interceptors rather than the other way around. This entanglement complicated arms control efforts and Cold War diplomacy from the earliest days of the space age and throughout the history of SDI. 

In chapter 2 (“Campaign for the High Ground”), Bateman describes Reagan’s aspirations for U.S. leadership in space, his vision for SDI, and the early problems he encountered considering the entanglement of missile defense and offensive space weapon technology. The space-based layer of SDI, styled “Star Wars” by the popular media of the 1980s, was the most controversial program within SDI, which involved work on several phenomenologies for defeating inbound missiles. However, hit-to-kill interceptors held the greatest promise for a near-term capability. Although SDI was decades away from operational effectiveness, the Soviets understood that SDI technology such as hit-to-kill interceptors could be used to threaten satellites well before the technology was effective for missile defense. The spiraling entanglement of missile defense and offensive space weapons tightened further as SDI program managers advocated for antisatellite capabilities to defend the space-based SDI assets they knew would be vulnerable to Soviet ASATs.

Bateman, through reference to recently declassified records, reconstructs the internal deliberations of White House and Kremlin leaders who were seeking to hedge against a surprise technological breakthrough by the other side. Chapter 3 (“Out of the Black”) recounts the Reagan White House’s efforts to build domestic and international support for SDI and the challenges of doing so with respect to a program that involved highly classified space technologies. Chapter 4 (“Europe Must Not Leave Space to the Americans”) further develops this theme by assessing the impact of SDI on U.S. relations with European powers and by exploring the reasons why states in Western Europe acted individually—rather than as a collective European effort—in balancing their concerns about an arms race in outer space with their fear of being excluded from a major advanced technology program. Ultimately, European leaders were forced to address the politically controversial questions of space militarization and found that “it was not easy to disentangle the economic and military elements in Western European space policy.”

SDI was also entangled in problems of logistics (which, in the case of SDI, primarily meant space launch). As discussed in chapter 5 (“Out of the Laboratory and Into Space”), the large number of interceptors contemplated for a space-based SDI layer would require launch capability orders of magnitude greater and cheaper than existed at the time, or today, for that matter. NASA’s space shuttle held the promise of a more cost-effective launch platform than fully expendable systems for both military and civilian payloads. This promise was not ultimately realized; the cost to launch satellites via the shuttle remained as expensive (or more expensive) than expendable launch options, and the entanglement of civil, military, and intelligence activities in shuttle missions presented new problems for each sector. The Challenger disaster effectively closed that path to space access for SDI, and it never found another one.

Following the 1991 Gulf War and the collapse of the Soviet Union (as told in chapter 6, “SDI and the New World Order”), the United States reprioritized its missile defense energies toward theater missile defense rather than strategic defense. The end of the Cold War lowered the perceived urgency of the need for a system like SDI, while increasingly capable spacefaring states like China, India, Israel, and Pakistan were gaining new international influence in space and security matters. The principal chapters of Weapons in Space conclude with the Clinton-era decision to wind down most SDI initiatives, preserving some ground- and sea-based theater missile defense programs in the successor to the Strategic Defense Initiative Office: the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (known today as Missile Defense Agency).

In an afterword chapter, “A Sense of Déjà Vu,” Bateman briefly addresses the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, President George W. Bush’s decision to withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and the rise of China as the main U.S. competitor. A fulsome study of the two decades in which these events unfolded and their relation to space programs would have been beyond the scope of this book. However, the brief post-SDI history suffices to bring the reader from the 1990s to the present and for Bateman to highlight why the study of SDI history is important for strategists today: SDI remains entangled with current U.S. space programs in the imaginations of Russia and China in the modern era of Great Power competition. Bateman states:

Chinese and Russian defense publications reveal that SDI remains an influential factor in Beijing’s and Moscow’s view of recent U.S. military space capabilities and strategy From the standpoint of Chinese military experts, SDI represented the U.S. embrace of “space superiority” as the view that space is indeed a warfighting domain. Fundamentally, SDI continues to play an important role in both Russian and Chinese narratives about space militarization. If the U.S. Government decides at some future date to pursue space-based interceptors, it will again become the subject of great domestic political and international controversy.

The entanglement of missile defense and offensive space weapons technology means these systems will always present national security leaders with a dilemma: how can the United States defend the homeland, allies, and the joint force from missiles holding them at risk without inviting unacceptable risk to U.S. and friendly space systems? Weapons in Space is an important contribution to the literature addressing that question. JFQ