1. Robert S. McNamara, excerpts from a speech delivered September 18, 1967, in San Francisco before a meeting of journalists, reprinted in ABM: An Evaluation of the Decision to Deploy an Antiballistic Missile System, ed. Abram Chayes and Jerome B. Wiesner (New York: New American Library, 1969), p. 237.

2. For the role of the refugee physicists, see Richard G. Hewlett and Oscar E. Anderson, Jr., A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, vol. 1: The New World, 1939-1946 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1962), pp. 14-19; Martin Sherwin, A World Destroyed (New York: Knopf, 1975), pp. 18-30; and J. Stefan Dupré and Sanford A. Lakoff, Science and the Nation: Policy and Politics (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962), pp. 91-93.

3. Truman reached his decision after the question had been well aired within the executive branch. The General Advisory Committee to the Atomic Energy Commission had recommended against a clash program, but the commissioners themselves favored proceeding with it by 3 to 2. Truman asked a subcommittee of the National Security Council, composed of AEC chairman David E. Lilienthal, Secretary of Defensè Louis Johnson, and Secretary of State Dean Acheson, to review the matter for him. The subcommittee was in favor by 2 to 1. Truman's decision was supported by prominent nuclear physicists, including Karl T. Compton, Edward Teller, Ernest O. Lawrence, John von Neumann, and Luis Alvarez. See Herbert F. York, The Advisors: Oppenheimer, Teller, and the Superbomb (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1976).

4. Studies of defense policy making provide support for each of these factors. The role of "bureaucratic politics," i.e., the interplay of departments and agencies in the executive branch, acting out of organizational interest and perspective, is often stressed. Thus, in The Polaris System Development: Bureaucratic and Programmatic Success in Government (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), Harvey M. Sapolsky notes that the success of the Polaris project was a result of the skill of its proponents in bureaucratic politics: "Competitors had to be eliminated; reviewing agencies had to be outmaneuvered; congressmen, admirals, newspapermen, and academicians had to be co-opted" (p. 244). In examining the controversy between the army and air force over which service should get responsibility for intermediate-range ballistic missiles, Michael H. Armacost also notes the importance of lobbying by the services and the applicability of the pressure-group model of analysis. He points out, however, that the services found it necessary to build consensus among journalists, members of Congress, analysts in quasi-autonomous "think tanks," and "an extensive network of scientific and technical advisory committees located within the Executive branch," and that this "very pluralism assured the government of a broad base of scientific and technical advice, and, superimposed upon service rivalries, this provided additional insurance that criticism of weapons programs was persistent and far from perfunctory" (The Politics of Weapons Innovation: The Thor-Jupiter Controversy [New York: Columbia University Press, 1969], p. 256).

Ted Greenwood, in a study of the decision to adopt the MIRV principle for warheads, argues persuasively against adoption of any single-factor analysis, noting that the decision to adopt MIRV resulted from "the complex interplay of technological opportunity, bureaucratic politics, strategic and policy preferences of senior decisionmakers, and great uncertainty about Soviet activities" (Making the MIRV: A Study of Defense Decision Making [Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1975], p. xv). Other studies, such as Gordon Adams, The Politics of Defense Contracting: The Iron Triangle (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1982), emphasize the role of the "iron triangle" (the federal bureaucracy, the key committees and members of Congress, and the defense contractors) in promoting military expenditures. Seymour Melman, in Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), contends that the managers of DOD "sell weapons-improvement programs to Congress and the public" (p. 70). None of these factors played a significant role in the decision to begin SDI, though they may well become important when and if the research phase is succeeded by a commitment to develop and deploy an SDI system, when the stakes will be much higher.

5. McNamara, in ABM: An Evaluation, p. 236. Graham T. Allison has suggested, however, that "U.S. research and development has been as much self-generated as Soviet-generated." See his "Questions About the Arms Race: Who's Racing Whom? A Bureaucratic Perspective," in Contrasting Approaches to Strategic Arms Control, ed. Robert L. Pfaltzgraff, Jr. (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1974), p. 42.

6. Herbert F. York, Race to Oblivion: A Participant's View of the Arms Race (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), pp. 238-39.

7. Paul B. Stares, The Militarization of Space: U.S. Policy, 1945-84 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 190-92.

8. Testimony of Robert S. Cooper before the U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Armed Services, Hearing on Strategic and Theater Nuclear Forces, 97th Cong., 2d sess., pt. 7, March 16, 1982, pp. 4845-76.

9. Reagan's solicitation of advice on SDI from "a highly selective group" that was, in addition, intensely loyal to him has been contrasted with Eisenhower's submission of the proposal for a nuclear test ban to a broadly representative group of scientists in the President's Science Advisory Committee in G. Allen Greb, Science Advice to Presidents: From Test Bans to the Strategic Defense Initiative, Research Paper no. 3 (La Jolla: University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, 1987), p. 15.

10. For a detailed account of how Eisenhower reached these decisions, see Samuel P. Huntington, The Common Defense (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), pp. 326-41.

11. Interview in Newsweek, March 18, 1985, quoted in Star Wars Quotes (Washington, D.C.: Arms Control Association, 1986), p. 26.

12. National Party Platforms of 1980, comp. Donald Bruce Johnson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), p. 207. Richard V. Allen, who was to become President Reagan's first assistant for national security affairs, was influential in the adoption of the plank, according to his colleague, Martin Anderson, who was responsible for pressing Reagan's views on domestic policy with the platform drafters. See Martin Anderson, Revolution (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), p. 87.

13. See Garry Wills, Reagan's America: Innocents at Home (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1987), p. 361, and Michael Paul Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 1-2. The finale of the movie recapitulates the classical myth in which Phaeton, claiming to be the son of Apollo, nearly destroys the world by driving Apollo's chariot of the sun erratically until Jupiter rescues the earth by loosing a thunderbolt and arresting the flight.

14. Quoted in Anderson, Revolution, p. 83.

15. Text of interview in Robert Scheer, With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush, and Nuclear War (New York: Random House, 1982), pp. 232-33.

16. Anderson, Revolution, pp. 85-86.

17. The air force's "Space Master Plan" was publicized in July 1983 by Aviation Week & Space Technology. Stares, Militarization of Space, p. 219.

18. Quoted in Frank Greve, "Star Wars," San Jose Mercury News, November 17, 1985.

19. Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, vol. 19, no. 13 (Washington, D.C.: White House, April 4, 1983), p. 453. Reagan had also used the same image years before: "As early as 1976, when he was challenging Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination, he criticized deterrence, comparing the arrangement to two people with guns cocked at each other's head." Michael Mandelbaum and Storbe Talbott, Reagan and Gorbachev (New York: Vintage, 1987), p. 126.

20. Daniel O. Graham, "Towards a New U.S. Strategy: Bold Strokes Rather Than Increments," Strategic Review (Spring 1981): 9-16.

21. Daniel O. Graham, High Frontier, A New National Strategy (Washington, D.C.: High Frontier, 1982), pp. 9, 18, 20.

22. Cooper testimony, Senate Armed Services Committee, p. 4635.

23. GAO, "DOD's Space-Based Laser Program—Potential, Progress, and Problems," Report by the Comptroller General of the United States (Washington, D.C.: GAO, February 26, 1982), pp. iii-iv.

24. In 1982 DOD established a space laser program, as recommended by DARPA, in cooperation with the air force and the army. The plan called for the expenditure of $800 million over the period from FY1982 through FY1988, under the supervision of the office of the assistant secretary for directed energy weapons.

25. Gregg Herken, Cardinal Choices: The President's Science Advisers from Roosevelt to Reagan, draft of chap. 6, p. 21. A substantial part of this chapter has been published as "The Earthly Origins of 'Star Wars,'" Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (October 1987), pp. 20-28.

26. Pete V. Domenici, "Towards a Decision on Ballistic Missile Defense," Strategic Review (Winter 1982): 22-27.

27. William J. Broad, Star Warriors (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), pp. 39-40.

28. Edward Teller, "SDI: The Last Best Hope," Insight (October 20, 1985), pp. 75-79.

29. Broad, Star Warriors, p. 122. "In all," according to Broad, "Teller met with the President four times over the course of little more than a year." Teller, in a letter to the authors (September 21, 1987) claims to have had little direct influence on the president's decision: "Before the President's announcement of SDI, I had two very brief meetings with the President. I expressed no more than my general support and good hopes." In the September meeting, he recalls, "defense was mentioned but no subject like the X-ray laser was explicitly discussed." With respect to the X-ray laser, Teller's recollection does not jibe with Keyworth's. See Herken, Cardinal Choices, p. 23.

30. Quoted in Greve, "Star Wars."

31. Quoted by Broad, Star Warriors, p. 73.

32. Edward Teller with Allen Brown, The Legacy of Hiroshima (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962), pp. 128-29.

33. Edward Teller (Address to the Faculty Seminar on International Security at the University of California, San Diego, December 12, 1983).

34. Anderson, Revolution, p. 95.

35. Ibid.

36. Greve, "Star Wars."

37. Statement by the assistant for directed energy weapons to the under secretary of defense for research and engineering before the U.S. Congress, Senate Subcommittee on Strategic and Theater Nuclear Forces of the Committee on Armed Services, 98th Cong., 1st sess., March 23, 1983.

38. Richard DeLauer, quoted in Arms Control Reporter (November 10, 1983).

39. Richard DeLauer, interview in Government Executive (July-August 1983), quoted in Star Wars Quotes, p. 34.

40. Greve, "Star Wars."

41. Ibid.

42. Herken, Cardinal Choices, chap. 6, pp. 46-47.

43. John Bardeen, letter to the editor, Arms Control Today (July-August 1986), p. 2.

44. Greve, "Star Wars."

45. Hedrick Smith, The Power Game: How Washington Works (New York: Random House, 1988), pp. 612-14.

46. Anderson, Revolution, p. 43.

47. Greve, "Star Wars."

48. Ibid.

49. Anderson, Revolution, p. 97.

50. Greve, "Star Wars."

51. Testimony of Robert C. McFarlane before the U.S. Congress, Defense Policy Subcommittee, House Armed Services Committee, May 17, 1988, typescript, pp. 167-68.

52. Ronald W. Reagan, interview, U.S. News and World Report (November 18, 1985), p. 30.

53. Text of the "Star Wars" speech, New York Times, March 24, 1983.

54. McFarlane testimony, Defense Policy Subcommittee, pp. 165-66; Mr. McFarlane's testimony was not altogether clear at this point. We have therefore supplied (in brackets) some punctuation and the subjects of unclear pronoun referents not supplied in the original transcript yet needed for sense.

55. The CIA view was presented in the testimony by Robert M. Gates and Lawrence K. Gershwin before a joint session of the Subcommittee on Strategic and Theater Nuclear Forces of the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Defense Subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, June 26, 1985. The Joint Chiefs' view is reported in Strobe Talbott, Deadly Gambits: The Reagan Administration and the Stalemate in Nuclear Arms Control (New York: Knopf, 1984), p. 224.

56. Helmut Sonnenfeldt (Address at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, November 29, 1986).

57. Thomas C. Schelling, "What Went Wrong with Arms Control?" Foreign Affairs 64 (Winter 1985-86): 217-33.

58. See Michael Novak, "Moral Clarity in the Nuclear Age," National Review (April 1, 1983), pp. 354-62, and "The Bishops Speak Out," National Review (June 10, 1983), pp. 674-81.

59. "Star Wars" speech, New York Times.

60. Herken, Cardinal Choices, chap. 6, p. 49.

61. "Star Wars" speech, New York Times.

62. Ibid.

63. Excerpt from an interview with Andropov in Pravda, March 27, 1983, quoted in Sidney D. Drell, Philip J. Farley, and David Holloway, The Reagan Strategic Defense Initiative: A Technical, Political, and Arms Control Assessment (Stanford, Calif.: Center for International Security and Arms Control, Stanford University, 1984), appendix B, p. 105.

64. McGeorge Bundy, George F. Kennan, Robert S. McNamara, and Gerard Smith, "The President's Choice: Star Wars or Arms Control," Foreign Affairs 63 (Winter 1984-85): 270-72.

65. Reagan interview with six journalists, Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, vol. 19, no. 13 (Washington, D.C.: White House, April 4, 1983), p. 471.

66. A 1985 Sindlinger Poll found that 85 percent of the U.S. public favored development of a missile defense "even if it can't protect everyone." Jeffrey Hart, "A Surprising Poll on Star Wars," Washington Times, August 9, 1985. A Gallup Poll in November 1985 found 61 percent in favor of the United States proceeding with SDI. Christian Science Monitor, November 21, 1985.

67. Soviet Strategic Defense Program (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Defense and Department of State, October 1985).

68. On December 7, 1983, Secretary Weinberger was quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying: "I can't imagine a more destabilizing factor for the world than if the Soviets should acquire a thoroughly reliable defense against these missiles before we did." Cited in Star Wars Quotes, p. 52.

69. See Colin S. Gray, "Air Defence: A Sceptical View," Queens Quarterly 79 (Spring 1972): 9, where he notes that boost-phase interception of ICBMs "would take the lion's share of the current U.S. defence budget."

70. Colin S. Gray, American Military Space Policy: Information Systems, Weapons Systems, and Arms Control (Cambridge, Mass.: Abt Books, 1982), pp. 15-16.

71. "The low incremental costs per kill ... could make lasers effective against other targets, such as bombers and cruise missiles. Given the ability to detect them, either could be attacked from space for the incremental cost of the fuel required. Space lasers could engage tactical aircraft at cost advantages of about 100:1." Gregory H. Canavan, "Defense Technologies for Europe," in Strategic Defense and the Western Alliance, ed. Sanford Lakoff and Randy Willoughby (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1987), p. 49.

72. "A defended America could more reasonably make security guarantees to NATO-Europe because it would face fewer risks in doing so. A U.S. deterrent threat on behalf of its allies would be much more credible if that threat did not enable the potential destruction of the U.S." Keith B. Payne, Strategic Defense: "Star Wars" in Perspective (Lanham, Md.: Hamilton, 1986), p. 214.

73. See William D. Hartung et al., in The Strategic Defense Initiative: Costs, Contractors, and Consequences, ed. Alice Tepper Marlin and Paula Lippin (New York: Council on Economic Priorities, 1985); John P. Holdren and F. Bailey Green, "Military Spending, the SDI, and Government Support of Research and Development: Effects on the Economy and the Health of American Science," F.A.S. Public Interest Report 39 (September 1986); and Daniel S. Greenberg, "Civilian Research Spinoffs from SDI Are a Delusion," Los Angeles Times, September 9, 1986.

74. The potential economic benefits were stressed in Graham, High Frontier, pp. 89-98, and more recently in SDIO, Report to Congress on the Strategic Defense Initiative (Washington, D.C.: SDIO, April 1987), pp. viii, 2-5.

75. "You know, we only have a military-industrial complex until a time of danger, and then it becomes the arsenal of democracy. Spending for defense is investing in things that are priceless—peace and freedom." President Ronald Reagan, State of the Union Address, February 6, 1985, Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, vol. 21, no. 6 (Washington, D.C.: White House, February 11, 1985), p. 143.

76. For a presentation of this conservative view, see Norman Podhoretz, The Present Danger (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980), pp. 56-57.

77. Ibid.

78. For an exposition of the "Reagan doctrine" see Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, "The Reagan Doctrine and U.S. Foreign Policy" (Washington, D.C.: Heritage Foundation, 1983) and "Implementing the Reagan Doctrine," National Security Record no. 82 (Washington, D.C.: Heritage Foundation, August 1985). The doctrine is examined critically in Stephen S. Rosenfeld, "The Guns of July," Foreign Affairs 64 (Spring 1986): 698-714.

79. Garry Wills, Reagan, p. 360. The broad appeal of SDI is noted in Kevin Phillips, "Defense Beyond Thin Air: Space Holds the Audience," Los Angeles Times, March 10, 1985.

80. Fred S. Hoffman, study director, Ballistic Missile Defenses and U.S. National Security (Summary report prepared for the Future Security Strategy Group, October 1983).

81. "Given the drastically changed strategic balance and the developments in offensive arms control and BMD technology since the signing of the ABM Treaty, an important question is whether it serves a useful purpose." Payne, Strategic Defense, p. 161.

82. "We would see the transition period as a cooperative endeavor with the Soviets. Arms control would play a critical role. We would, for example, envisage continued reductions in offensive nuclear arms." Paul H. Nitze, "On the Road to a More Stable Peace" (address to the Philadelphia World Affairs Council, February 20, 1985); published as Current Policy no. 657 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Public Affairs).

83. Ibid.

84. Alvin M. Weinberg and Jack N. Barkenbus, "Stabilizing Star Wars," Foreign Policy 54 (Spring 1984): 164-70, and Weinberg and Barkenbus, eds., Strategic Defenses and Arms Control (New York: Paragon House, 1987).

85. "To achieve agreements drastically reducing numbers of offensive weapons, and to provide assurance against clandestine violations of such agreements, some deployment of missile defenses may be helpful. In the long run, the transition from a world of assured destruction to a world of live-and-let-live must be accompanied by a transfer of emphasis from offensive to defensive weapons." Freeman Dyson, Weapons and Hope (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), p. 281.

86. Reagan, quoted in New York Times, October 15, 1986.

87. See Thomas K. Longstreth, John E. Pike, and John B. Rhinelander, The Impact of U.S. and Soviet Ballistic Missile Defense Programs on the ABM Treaty (Washington, D.C.: National Campaign to Save the ABM Treaty, March 1985), pp. 42-51, and Peter A. Clausen, "Transition Improbable: Arms Control and SDI," in Empty Promise: The Growing Case Against Star Wars, ed. John Tirman, Union of Concerned Scientists (Boston: Beacon, 1986), pp. 191—92.

88. Robert C. McFarlane, in a television interview, quoted in Arms Control Reporter (October 1985).

89. Ambassador Smith made this comment on October 6, 1985; quoted in Arms Control Reporter (October 1985).

90. Gerard C. Smith, letter to the editor, New York Times, October 23, 1985.

91. George P. Shultz (Address to the North Atlantic Assembly, San Francisco, October 14, 1985), quoted in Arms Control Reporter (October 1985).

92. Report to Congress on the Strategic Defense Initiative (Washington, D.C.: SDIO, June 1986), appendix C.

93. Thus, Sidney D. Drell has called for "a prudent, deliberate, and high-quality research program ... within ABM Treaty limits" at a level of roughly $2 billion per year. "Prudence and the 'Star Wars' Effort: Research Within the Bounds of ABM Treaty Can Aid Safer World," Los Angeles Times, March 10, 1985.

94. See especially Yevgeni Velikhov, Roald Sagdeyev, and Andrei Kokoshin, eds., Weaponry in Space: The Dilemma of Security (Moscow: Mir Publishers, 1986), chap. 4, pp. 69-77, chap. 7, pp. 106-27.

95. "The Department of Defense Directed Energy Program and Its Relevance to Strategic Defense," statement by the assistant for directed energy weapons to the under secretary of defense for research and engineering before the Subcommittee on Strategic and Theater Nuclear Forces of the Committee on Armed Services, U.S. Senate, 98th Cong., 1st sess., March 23, 1983, p. 3.