The Strategic Screening; SDI Has a Star Role in Defense Lobby Film
The problem wasn't opposition to the idea of Strategic Defense Initiative lasers blasting enemy missiles out of space; it wasn't complaints that a country that can't get the B1 bomber flying right is going to have a hard time zapping Soviet warheads with particle beams in an outer-space skeet shoot; it wasn't worries that a stock market crash will keep us from spending billions to acquire the SDI system that President Reagan proposed in 1983.</br></br>No. For those at last night's screening of a new half-hour film about SDI produced by the American Defense Preparedness Association, the problem was described best by Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, who said: "Most Americans believe we already have a strategic defense system."</br></br>Who can blame them? Mikhail Gorbachev backs out of a Washington summit meeting because of our SDI. We've been talking about it for four years, ever since Reagan proposed it. It has required a reinterpretation of the 1972 antiballistic missile treaty with the Russians. And it even has a nickname.</br></br>"They sneer at it by calling it `Star Wars,' and unwittingly hand the Soviets a propaganda tool," Weinberger said in a speech before the movie went on in a hotel ballroom full of defense contractors, congressional aides, young staffers from the White House and the Defense Department, and a sprinkling of journalists.</br></br>Nevertheless, SDI does not exist yet, at least as a way of shooting down missiles. Hence this film, titled "SDI: The Prospect for Peace" and made by ADPA, a defense lobby and educational group largely funded by defense contractors.