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US President Ronald Reagan announced 41 years ago the start of an intensive, “long-term” program whose ultimate goal would be to render adversaries’ nuclear missiles useless. This program is known as “Star Wars”.
Donald Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, on March 23, 1983, saying: “I have ordered a comprehensive and intensive effort to pursue a long-term research and development program to achieve our ultimate goal of eliminating the threat posed by strategic missiles with nuclear warheads.”
Reagan’s “Star Wars” program envisioned a large-scale system incorporating laser-armed satellites, air- and ground-based anti-missiles, and electromagnetic guns, designed to intercept intercontinental ballistic missiles of the Soviets and other potential adversaries.
The film “Star Wars” appeared on cinema screens around the world six years before Reagan’s speech. The fictional superweapons in that film led the media to dub Reagan’s “Strategic Defense Initiative” “Star Wars.”
The story began in the early 1980s, when the Pentagon pushed an idea to President Ronald Reagan about establishing a protective “umbrella” with new and unprecedented concepts, as a result of concern over information about the appearance of new ballistic missiles in the Soviet Union.
Reagan liked the idea and proposed implementing it according to a plan of action using technologies that seemed at the time to be steeped in imagination, as combat lasers and electromagnetic guns had not yet appeared. Protecting American territory in an ideal way from Soviet missiles required launching thousands of satellites into orbit and building hundreds of radars.
This initiative threatened to launch a new and very dangerous global arms race, something that the United States did not pay any attention to, and it believed, in short, and according to the official story, that it would be able to possess an exceptional ability to destroy any enemy nuclear missiles, and thus push its main opponent, the Soviet Union, into a state of “… Despair” by rendering his nuclear weapons useless.
The “Star Wars” program required several decades to implement, in addition to its cost amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars, and there were no guarantees that such an extremely expensive system would work in an ideal manner at that supposed, decisive and only moment in which the Soviet Union decided to launch a strike. nuclear into American territory. Despite all this, until 1987, Congress regularly allocated more than $3 billion annually to develop Star Wars technologies.
Even at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the technologies promised by those behind “Star Wars” remained an impossible dream, and Washington did not come close to achieving any of the components of that legendary “umbrella” that they dreamed would protect the United States almost completely from any possible nuclear attack.
After the end of the Cold War, the Strategic Defense Initiative program was phased out, and it became clear that such a defense system could not be 100 percent effective against a large number of missiles from an opponent well prepared for nuclear war.
The techniques of the American “Star Wars” program, even if they were able to intercept 90 percent of the Soviet nuclear missiles, the remaining percentage would be able to turn the United States into ashes in any possible war at that time.
Although the United States practically abandoned its “Star Wars” program, it continued to develop some types of weapons provided for by that initiative until the end of the 1990s.
By 2002, the United States had spent more than $100 billion on this imaginary program, and had not succeeded in obtaining any technologies that could effectively protect it from a potential nuclear missile attack. The only result was an increase in the world’s terror of a “star war” on Earth and the loss of hundreds of billions in vain.
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