Strategic Defense Initiative
| SDIO | |
 |
|
| Agency overview | |
|---|---|
| Formed | 1984 |
| Dissolved | 1993 (renamed) |
| Superseding agency | |
| Jurisdiction | Federal government of the United States |
The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was a proposed missile defense system intended to protect the United States from attack by ballistic strategic nuclear weapons (intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-launched ballistic missiles). The system, which was to combine ground-based units and orbital deployment platforms, was first publicly announced by President Ronald Reagan on March 23, 1983. The initiative focused on strategic defense rather than the prior strategic offense doctrine of mutual assured destruction (MAD). The Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) was set up in 1984 within the United States Department of Defense to oversee the Strategic Defense Initiative.
Reagan was a vocal critic of MAD doctrine. SDI was an important part of his defense policy intended to end MAD as a nuclear deterrence strategy, as well as a strategic initiative to neutralize the military component of the Soviet Union's nuclear defenses.
The ambitious initiative was criticized for allegedly threatening to destabilize the MAD-approach and to possibly re-ignite "an offensive arms race". SDI was nicknamed largely in the mainstream media as "Star Wars", after the popular 1977 film by George Lucas. In 1987, the American Physical Society concluded that a global shield such as "Star Wars" was extremely ambitious and with existing technology not directly feasible for operational status, and that about ten more years of research was needed to learn about such a comprehensive and complex system to set up and make it fully operational.
Under the SDIO's Innovative Sciences and Technology Office, headed by physicist and engineer Dr. James Ionson, the investment was predominantly made in basic research at national laboratories, universities, and in industry; these programs have continued to be key sources of funding for top research scientists in the fields of high-energy physics, supercomputing/computation, advanced materials, and many other critical science and engineering disciplines—funding which indirectly supports other research work by top scientists, and which was most politically viable to fund within the budget environment.
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