Policy makers tied it closely with the domino theory. It takes its name from the sustained public singing in its early days. Orthodox historians argue that the Cold War was started by Joseph Stalins violation of post-war agreements and the expansionist nature of Soviet communism. In this speech Khrushchev denounced the tyranny, brutality and abuses of power under his predecessor, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. [59] Such critics often cite the X-ray laser system as being the primary focus of SDI, with its apparent failure being a main reason to oppose the program; however, the laser was never more than one of the many systems being researched for ballistic missile defense. Shultzs assessment proved to be correct. 2. The Rage Against The War Machine Rally in D.C. could bring back the anti-war movement in America (Video) TikTok A.I. But we should overcome our obsession with it. THE SECOND Cold War is a rematch among the same teams that opposed each other for most of the First Cold War. The Second Cold War is sometimes used to describe the post-Dtente revival of tensions during the early 1980s. [42], On March 23, 1983, Reagan announced SDI in a nationally televised speech, stating "I call upon the scientific community in this country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete. This Cold War glossary contains definitions for key terms, concepts and events between 1945 and 1991. [citation needed] Furthermore, the MAD argument was criticized on the grounds that MAD only covered intentional, full-scale nuclear attacks by a rational, non-suicidal opponent with similar values. They are colloquially known as hydrogen bombs or H-bombs. Ballistic Missile Defense Technology: Is the United States Ready for A Decision to Deploy? The Sino-Soviet split was a breakdown in relations between China and the Soviet Union during the mid to late 1960s. The National Security Agency or NSA is an American government agency, formed in 1952. To the original SDS, GPALS added a new mobile ground-based missile, and added more low-orbit satellites known as Brilliant Eyes to feed information to the Pebbles. In 1985, for example, physicist Wolfgang Panofsky wrote in Physics Today, ABM defense technology deserves further research within treaty limits, but the Star Wars program is too large, too political, raises false hopes and poses grave dangers to national and world security. Members of the Reagan administration, however, pushed back against this notion. In 1992, scientist Aldric Saucier was given whistleblower protection after he was fired and complained about "wasteful spending on research and development" at the SDI. Terra-3 was a Soviet laser testing centre, located on the Sary Shagan anti-ballistic missile (ABM) testing range in the Karaganda Region of Kazakhstan. Griffin. This raised significant issues about economic and technical costs associated with defending against anti-ballistic missile defense countermeasures used by the attacking side. Socialism is a political system which aims to transition from capitalism to communism. [69] LACE was also used to evaluate ground-based adaptive optics, a technique now used in civilian telescopes to remove atmospheric distortions. It was dubbed the Military Marshall Plan. The project was abandoned in 1959. proxy war MI5 The satellite observed several ballistic missile launches including some releasing liquid propellant as a countermeasure to detection. Political scientist Kerry L. Hunter explained this phenomenon: The power of Reagans Star Wars visionlay in its utopian characteristics. Ballistic missiles are used to deliver nuclear, chemical, biological, or conventional warheads in a ballistic flight trajectory.The term "anti-ballistic missile" is a generic term conveying a system designed to intercept and destroy any type of ballistic threat; however, it is . [85][86], In 1986 Carl Sagan summarized what he heard Soviet commentators were saying about SDI, with a common argument being that it was equivalent to starting an economic war through a defensive arms race to further cripple the Soviet economy with extra military spending, while another interpretation was that it served as a disguise for the US wish to initiate a first strike on the Soviet Union.[88]. 128, "Think Tanks and US Military and Diplomatic Affairs", in, K. Tsipis, "Third-Generation Nuclear Weapons,". Ostpolitik was a Dtente era policy adopted by West Germany and its leader, Willy Brandt. It was an important source of American strategic ideas during the Cold War. The Soviet predisposition to see deception behind the SDI was reinforced by their assessment of US intentions and capabilities and the utility of military deception in furthering the achievement of political goals. OPEC stands for the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, a cartel founded in Baghdad in September 1960. neutron bomb Through the magnetic forces that this system achieves, a force is exerted on the projectile moving it down the rail. In addition to the ideas presented by the original Heritage group, a number of other concepts were also considered. It was updated on February 1st, 2023. Rezidentura is a Russian word, describing a base of operations for spies in foreign countries. The primary application of this doctrine started during the Cold War (1940s to 1991), in which MAD was seen as helping to prevent any direct full-scale conflicts between the United States and the Soviet Union while they engaged in smaller proxy wars around the world. In a speech to the Federal Assembly in March 2018, Russian President Vladimir Putin criticized the United States decision to withdraw from ABM and asserted the ability of Russian nuclear forces to penetrate any potential anti-ballistic missile system. post-colonialism [47] The GPALS system also was able to protect the United States from attacks coming from all different parts of the world.[47]. Theyre pursuing this program to wear us out (Rhodes 224). The Strategic Defense Initiative became a key negotiating point in a series of meetings between Reagan and Gorbachev: the Geneva Summit (1985), the Reykjavik Summit (1986), the Washington Summit (1987), and the Moscow Summit (1988). [17] Through declassified papers of American intelligence agencies the wider implications and effects of the program were examined and revealed that due to the potential neutralization of its arsenal and resulting loss of a balancing power factor, SDI was a cause of grave concern for the Soviet Union and her primary successor state Russia. In 2019, space-based interceptor development resumed for the first time in 25 years with President Trump's signing of the National Defense Authorization Act. Sino-Soviet split The Strategic Defence Initiative was a missile defence program, initiated by the Reagan administration in 1983. [66] The experiment successfully demonstrated that a particle beam would operate and propagate as predicted outside the atmosphere and that there are no unexpected side-effects when firing the beam in space. The Madman theory was a strategy or ploy used by United States president Richard Nixon during the Cold War. Red Scare In March 1984, Bethe coauthored a 106-page report for the Union of Concerned Scientists that concluded "the X-ray laser offers no prospect of being a useful component in a system for ballistic missile defense. In which John Green teaches you about the Cold War, the decades-long conflict between the USA and the USSR. mutually assured destruction (or MAD) While SDS was being proposed, Lawrence Livermore National had introduced a new concept known as Brilliant Pebbles. Revisionist historians Volume 1: Project Summary", "Accelerator-driven Nuclear Energy | Accelerator Driven Systems | Transmutation - World Nuclear Association", Statement of Lieutenant General Malcolm R. O'Neill, USA, Director, BMDO before the Committee on National Security, House of Representatives, April 4, 1995, Low-power Atmospheric Compensation Experiment (LACE). Their Project Defender studied all sorts of systems, before abandoning most of them to concentrate on Project BAMBI. This act required communist organisations to register with the government, while government agencies were given power to investigate subversive activities. SDI officially ended in 1993, when the Clinton Administration redirected the efforts towards theatre ballistic missiles and renamed the agency the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO). During the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan initiated the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), an anti-ballistic missile program that was designed to shoot down nuclear missiles in space. The Singing Revolution is a name given to the independence movement in the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) between 1987 and 1991. Sharon Watkins Lang. It was designed to work in conjunction with BSTS, but was later scaled down in favor of the Brilliant Eyes program.[72]. GPALS was approved by President George H.W. In 1993, the Clinton administration further shifted the focus to ground-based interceptor missiles and theater scale systems, forming the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO) and closing the SDIO. Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (or SALT I and SALT II) Reagan pitched building an ambitious anti-missile system in 1983 dubbed "Star Wars." The R&D effort, which included space-based lasers, was sidetracked by funding shortfalls and the collapse of. Wind of change [71], Groups of interceptors were to be housed in orbital modules. This boost phase intercept rendered MIRV impotent; a successful attack would destroy all of the warheads. Sputnik (Russian for traveller) was the name of the first two man-made satellites to orbit Earth. "[43], In 1984, the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) was established to oversee the program, which was headed by Lt. General James Alan Abrahamson USAF, a past Director of the NASA Space Shuttle program.[1]. Politburo The launch of Sputnik I triggered American fears that the US had fallen behind the Soviet Union in space technology. Solidarnosc (or Solidarity) By 1985, SDIO was serving as an umbrella for the 22 think tanks and aerospace firms working on the program (OConnell 76). Cold War - UPSC Notes:-Download PDF Here. [61], Beginning in 1985, the Air Force tested an SDIO-funded deuterium fluoride laser known as Mid-Infrared Advanced Chemical Laser (MIRACL) at White Sands Missile Range. Coming so close to Armageddon motivated leaders of both nations to undertake some of the world's first nuclear arms control pacts, including the Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963. Shultz suggests that this feeling of helplessness, coupled with the defensive ideas proposed by Teller a decade earlier, combined to form the impetus of the SDI. Singing Revolution Research out of hypervelocity railgun technology was done to build an information base about railguns so that SDI planners would know how to apply the technology to the proposed defense system. The Missile Age begins when German V-2 missiles -- which have one-ton payloads and travel faster than the speed of sound -- strike London during World War II. It was the ideology that underpinned socialism in the Soviet Union and other Soviet bloc nations. In a speech to the Politburo in March 1986, Gorbachev exclaimed, Maybe we should just stop being afraid of SDI! Tsar Bomba Stasi was an abbreviation for the Ministry of State Security, a secret police agency in socialist East Germany. 1. These colonies became self-governing and many were subjected to Cold War pressures and influences. The Soviet bloc or Eastern bloc refers tocommunist nations in Europe during the Cold War. The announcement of SDI shocked officials around the globe. nuclear deterrence [89], In 1987 a disguised Mir space station module was lifted on the inaugural flight of the Energia booster as the Polyus and it has since been revealed that this craft housed a number of systems of the Skif laser, which were intended to be clandestinely tested in orbit, if it had not been for the spacecraft's attitude control system malfunctioning upon separation from the booster and it failing to reach orbit. August 25, 2021. Despite its many critics, the Strategic Defense Initiative was ultimately very popular with the American public. Physicist Roald Sagdeev, who was a part of this effort, recalled, You know what the major argument was for investigating? Among other controversies, SDI threatened to undermine the American and Soviet deterrence policy of mutually assured destruction (MAD). Physicists Hans Bethe and Richard Garwin, who worked with Edward Teller on both the atomic bomb and hydrogen bomb at Los Alamos, claimed a laser defense shield was unfeasible. New York, NY: Charles Scribers Sons, 1993. [92][93], Historians from the Missile Defense Agency attribute the term "Star Wars" to a Washington Post article published March 24, 1983, the day after the speech, which quoted Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy describing the proposal as "reckless Star Wars schemes", a reference to the fantasy franchise Star Wars. The actual design of SDI was also unclear; scientists and experts considered an enormous number of possibilities. Brilliant Eyes was a simpler derivative of the SSTS that focused on theater ballistic missiles rather than ICBMs and was meant to operate in conjunction with the Brilliant Pebbles system. A 1985 Gallup poll reported that 61% of respondents replied affirmatively to the question, Would you like to see the United States go ahead with the development of (SDI), or not?. Sagdeev later acknowledged, If Americans oversold [SDI], we Russians overbought it.. [90] Soviet motivations behind attempting to launch components of the Skif laser in the form of Polyus were, according to interviews conducted years later, more for propaganda purposes in the prevailing climate of focus on US SDI, than as an effective defense technology, as the phrase "Space based laser" has a certain political capital. Russia is likely offering Iran help with its advanced missile program in exchange for military aid for its . On the other hand, many others[who?] Sovietisation is a term for the process by which communist governments were installed in eastern European nations after World War II (1945-50). Truman pledged to support friendly nations in their struggle to resist communism. In addition to being considered for destroying ballistic missile threats, railguns were also being planned for service in space platform (sensor and battle station) defense. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Strategic_Defense_Initiative&oldid=1139087432, The immediate tactical action to reduce vulnerability, such as, Counter strategies which exploit a weakness of an opposing system, such as adding more. The War Zone has gone into detail about just how challenging shooting down a long-range ballistic missile is, and how rickety America's defenses really are when it comes to counter such an attack . These test conditions were used to simulate the loads a booster would be under during launch. Despite his concerns about the shortcomings of SDI as a legitimate system of defense, Shultz recalled saying at the time, The Soviets will assume that we are on the verge of some special technical innovation. During World War II, three countries decided to build the atomic bomb: Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union. Perestroika is a Russian word meaning restructuring. The Missile Defense Agency's Airborne Laser program uses a chemical laser which has successfully intercepted a missile taking off,[65] so an offshoot of SDI could be said to have successfully implemented one of the key goals of the program. It is technically feasible., Allies of the United States in Europe, particularly those in NATO, were also alarmed by the development of SDI. The Morgenthau Plan was an American plan for managing post-war Germany, devised in 1944. Tiananmen Square is a large public square in Beijing, the capital city of China. Soviet scientists were immediately tasked with investigating SDI. These findings, though later discredited, contributed to the US arms buildup under Ronald Reagan. Jessica Savitch reported on the technology in episode No.111 of Frontline, "Space: The Race for High Ground" on PBS on November 4, 1983. Under BMDO, ERINT was later chosen as the MIM-104 Patriot (Patriot Advanced Capability-3,PAC-3) missile.[48]. In 2001, President George W. Bush announced his administrations plan to withdraw from the ABM Treaty within six months. [16] After the publication of the APS report, SDI's budget was repeatedly cut. A thermonuclear weapon is a device that uses both fusion and fission, thus delivering a greater explosive yield. smaller, space-launched missiles known as Brilliant Pebbles., the Soviet economy was teetering on the brink of disaster, Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), has studied the possibilities of space-based anti-ballistic missile technology, a speech to the Federal Assembly in March 2018. The U-2 was an American spy plane used widely during the Cold War. It was founded to give Arab oil-producing nationsgreater leverage when dealing with US and Western oil companies. By 1987, however, Gorbachev agreed that missile reductions and SDI could be negotiated separately. This was part of Canada's role during the Cold War to defend North America against an attack from the Soviet Union. It was founded in 1961 by Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Yugoslavian president Josip Tito, Egyptian president Gamal Nasser and other leaders. The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and its subsequent protocol,[102] which limited missile defenses to one location per country at 100 missiles each (which the USSR had and the US did not), would have been violated by SDI ground-based interceptors. Two squadrons of the missile were purchased and deployed by the Canadian government in 1958. viewed favoring deployment of ABM systems as an escalation rather than cessation of the nuclear arms race, and therefore a violation of this clause. A President of the United States could offer to give that same defensive weapon to them to prove to them that there was no longer any need for keeping these missiles, explained Reagan. Reagan Doctrine Gorbachev, Mikhail. The LACE satellite also included several other experiments to help develop and improve SDI sensors, including target discrimination using background radiation and tracking ballistic missiles using Ultraviolet Plume Imaging (UVPI). OPEC Soldiers of the Soviet Union and the United States did not do battle directly during the Cold War. More recently, new developments under Project Excalibur by Teller's "O-Group" at LLNL suggested that a single X-ray laser could shoot down dozens of missiles with a single shot. The reason for so many programs was the rapidly changing strategic threat; the Soviets claimed to be producing missiles "like sausages", and ever-more missiles would be needed to defend against this growing fleet. Arsenals of Folly. Also, since only the projectile leaves the gun, a railgun system can potentially fire many times before needing to be resupplied. Four test launches were conducted in 1983 and 1984 at Kwajalein Missile Range in the Republic of the Marshall Islands. Of course we cant simply disregard this dangerous program. NATO (see North Atlantic Treaty Organisation). By 1986, many of the promising ideas were failing. Truman's decisions shaped it by enormously increasing wars and deaths and war-dismemberments and destructions and refugees, and especially by creating (and most especially by the continued cooperation of all U.S. Presidents since the time of GHW Bush who secretly decided to . The Red Scares were two periods of anti-communist hysteria in the United States. The Heritage Foundation provided High Frontier with space to conduct research, and Graham published a 1982 report entitled, "High Frontier: A New National Strategy" that examined in greater detail how the system would function.[40]. Amongst its terms was a limitation on the number of nuclear warheads and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Cold War leaders who utilised Stalinist methods included Kim Il-sung (North Korea), Nicolae Ceausescu (Romania) and Enver Hoxha (Albania). Early on Tuesday 16 October 1962, John F Kennedy's national security assistant, McGeorge Bundy, brought to the President's bedroom some high-altitude photographs taken from U-2 planes flying over. Although Reagan was sincerely invested in SDI for the purposes of national security and never intended for it to be a bargaining chip, many of his advisors acknowledged its potential as a negotiating tool. MI5 is short for Military Intelligence Section 5, the main British intelligence and espionage agency during the Cold War. In 1987, the American Physical Society concluded that the technologies being considered were decades away from being ready for use, and at least another decade of research was required to know whether such a system was even possible. Ambassador to Canada Thomas Niles explained, The Europeans saw SDI as an indication that the United States, at least theoretically, was interested in backing away from this commitment to Europe and building a Fortress America, with this high-tech system that would protect us, but not them.. While SDIO and SDS was ongoing, the Warsaw Pact was rapidly disintegrating, culminating in the destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989. An early estimate suggested one would have to spend $20 on defense for every $1 the Soviets spent on offense. military-industrial complex missile gap A New York Times op-ed similarly noted, It remains a pipe dream, a projection of fantasy into policy.Theres no statesmanship in science fiction., Scientists also expressed their doubts about SDI. [20] Early development contracts were awarded to L3Harris and SpaceX. Project A119 interceptor missiles that would destroy incoming ballistic missiles just by colliding with them head-on. Soviet research into anti-ballistic missiles had begun in the 1970s, well before Reagan announced SDI, but it was quickly made a top priority in 1983. For example, the sensors and cameras that were developed and manufactured for Brilliant Pebbles systems became components of the Clementine mission and SDI technologies may also have a role in future missile defense efforts. An early focus of the SDI effort was an X-ray lasers powered by nuclear explosions. Several nations developed nuclear weapons during the Cold War and the threat of nuclear war was ever-present. Brilliant Eyes was renamed Space and Missile Tracking System (SMTS) and scaled back further under BMDO, and in the late 1990s it became the low earth orbit component of the Air Force's Space Based Infrared System (SBIRS). As U.S. Reagans interest in anti-ballistic missile technology dated back to 1967 when, as governor of California, he paid a visit to physicist Edward Teller at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. rezidentura A Soviet military A-35 anti-ballistic missile system was deployed around Moscow to intercept enemy ballistic missiles targeting the city or its surrounding areas. [21] CIA Director Mike Pompeo called for additional funding to achieve a full-fledged Strategic Defense Initiative for our time, the SDI II". A strategic nuclear weapon is a larger yield device, intended for launching against cities, ports, military bases or other large targets of significance. In 1947, U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall proposed a massive aid program to rebuild Europe after the ravages of World War II. The announcement by Russian President Vladimir Putin that Russia would suspend its participation in the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) brings an unwelcome degree of clarity to a situation the United States almost certainly would have to face three years from now. The NSC is tasked with formulating and coordinating policy with regard to national security, foreign policy and military activities. perestroika Contents 1 Background 2 Soviet nuclear program 3 Long-range nuclear missiles 4 The nuclear arms race 5 Soviet size over quantity 6 Other nuclear-equipped states 7 Nuclear policy 8 Nuclear paranoia Background [35][36], In 1979, Teller contributed to a Hoover Institution publication where he claimed that the US would be facing an emboldened USSR due to their work on civil defense. The Reagan Files: Recently Released Documents Related to SDI. Launched on the same rocket as the RME, the Low-power Atmospheric Compensation Experiment (LACE) satellite was built by the United States Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) to explore atmospheric distortion of lasers and real-time adaptive compensation for that distortion. They believed that the only way to stop the threat of nuclear war was through diplomacy and dismissed the idea of a technical solution to the Cold War, saying that a defense shield could be viewed as threatening because it would limit or destroy Soviet offensive capabilities while leaving the American offense intact. During the 20th century, Western imperial powers like Britain and France withdrew from colonies in Africa, Asia and elsewhere. Early prototypes were essentially single-use weapons, requiring complete replacement of the rails after each firing. In-flight guidance, if implemented, would require the onboard navigation system to be built to the same level of sturdiness as the main mass of the projectile. [19] The program is currently managed by the Space Development Agency (SDA) as part of the new National Defense Space Architecture (NDSA) envisioned by Michael D. This is also a story that risks disappearing into its own "success." After all, the Cold War is history. Other spin-offs include research on advanced materials like SEAgel and Aerogel, the Electron-Beam Ion Trap facility for physics research, and enhanced techniques for early detection of breast cancer. During this period nuclear fallout and other debris lingers in the atmosphere, blocking out sunlight. What about stealth bombers? The American Physical Society (APS) had been asked by the SDIO to provide a review of the various concepts. National Museum of Nuclear Science & History. It was one of the Cold Wars most repressive and brutal security forces. Later on, the program focused on smaller, space-launched missiles known as Brilliant Pebbles.. SS-N-30 Russian warships let fly 26 of these cruise missiles on October 7, 2017. As Secretary of State Schultz explained, Prior to the presidents speech, even the possibility that the United States might seriously seek to defend itself from nuclear attack seemed outlandish. Edward Teller, for example, was an early proponent of the satellite X-ray laser, although it was ultimately ineffective. at the same time significancly currailing war.time production in the London area. [38], In the fall of 1979, at Reagan's request, Lieutenant General Daniel O. Graham, the former head of the DIA, briefed Reagan on an updated BAMBI he called High Frontier, a missile shield composed of multi-layered ground- and space-based weapons that could track, intercept, and destroy ballistic missiles, which would theoretically be possible because of emerging technologies. How did Gorbachev's policies signal the end of the Cold War? [46] The new system would cut the proposed costs of the SDI system from $53billion to $41billion over a decade. ABM systems were not a new idea. George Shultz, Reagan's secretary of state, suggested that a 1967 lecture by physicist Edward Teller (the so-called "father of the hydrogen bomb") was an important precursor to SDI.