[dropcapT[/dropcap]he Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), more commonly known as “Star Wars,” remains one of the most controversial aspects of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Frequently misrepresented as a science fiction fantasy focused on space lasers, in reality SDI was a multi-billion-dollar group of research projects into technologies with civilian and defense applications. Technological realities aside, Reagan hoped that SDI would produce a comprehensive massive missile defense system that might lead to the abolition of nuclear weapons. In the end, however, neither of those goals came to fruition. Regardless, in the 1980s, SDI was indeed a contentious issue between the United States and the Soviet Union and among the transatlantic alliance members.
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum
Review Essay 119
Luc-André Brunet, ed. NATO and the Strategic Defence Initiative: A Transatlantic History of the Star Wars Programme. Routledge, 2023. ISBN: 9780367612184.
Review by Aaron Bateman, George Washington University
10 April 2025 | PDF: http://issforum.org/to/RE119 | Website: rjissf.org | X: @HDiplo
Editor: Diane Labrosse
Commissioning Editor: Thomas Maddux
Production Editor: Christopher Ball
Pre-Production Copy Editor: Masami Kimura
[dropcapT[/dropcap]he Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), more commonly known as “Star Wars,” remains one of the most controversial aspects of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Frequently misrepresented as a science fiction fantasy focused on space lasers, in reality SDI was a multi-billion-dollar group of research projects into technologies with civilian and defense applications. Technological realities aside, Reagan hoped that SDI would produce a comprehensive massive missile defense system that might lead to the abolition of nuclear weapons. In the end, however, neither of those goals came to fruition. Regardless, in the 1980s, SDI was indeed a contentious issue between the United States and the Soviet Union and among the transatlantic alliance members.
NATO and the Strategic Defence Initiative: A Transatlantic History of the Star Wars Programme seeks to move beyond the bipolar superpower dynamic and bring an international history perspective to Reagan’s controversial project.[1] The volume’s editor, Luc-André Brunet, correctly points out that the international dimensions of SDI have been largely overlooked by historians.[2] This volume is a welcome part of a new wave of scholarship that treats SDI as a multi-national endeavor.[3] Relying on an impressive array of sources from the United States, Western Europe, and the former Soviet Union, it adds much nuance to the history of SDI and alliance politics as well as to the end of the Cold War and its immediate aftermath.
The volume consists of fourteen chapters that are organized into four sections. The first one focuses on the SDI and the superpowers, exploring Reagan’s rationale for the program and the Soviet response. The second investigates the politics of SDI participation by the NATO allies that formally became involved through bilateral agreements with Washington. The third analyzes the political calculus behind the rejection of formal SDI participation by certain NATO member states. The final section explores SDI from the civil-society and peace-movement perspectives in Britain and the United States. While the organization works well, a conclusion that weaves together the volume’s takeaways is noticeably absent.
Importantly, the book begins with an exploration of where SDI fit into Reagan’s broader foreign and defense policies. James Graham Wilson correctly points out that “SDI was an evolving concept” that had “less to do with specific technologies…,” and that Reagan was not wed to any particular SDI concept.[4] In explaining the immediate origins of SDI, he points to a combination of waning support for US strategic modernization, the prospect of new advanced technologies on the horizon, and the need for a bold program that would strengthen the US arms control negotiating position. All of these are compelling assertions, but SDI was also part of a broader push to harness space technologies to secure qualitative advantages over the Soviet Union. For Reagan and ardent SDI supporters, the space dimensions of the program were key to its success and represented the United States attempting to reassert its place as the leading nation in the superpower competition in the cosmos.[5]
SDI created much controversy among American scientific and political elites, and it generated deep anxiety among the Kremlin’s top leaders. Svetlana Savranskaya’s chapter tackles the Soviet perspective on SDI using a number of Soviet sources, especially the immeasurably valuable Kataev archive at the Hoover Institution, which contains the papers of Vitalii Leonidovich Kataev, a senior Soviet defense official and technical expert.[6] Savranskaya’s analysis reveals that there was not a homogenous view of SDI within the Soviet government (36). Reagan’s March 1983 “Star Wars” speech that led to the establishment of SDI the following year precipitated an intense debate among Soviet scientists, defense officials, and politicians about how to respond. She argues that the Soviet Union ultimately pursued a “dual-track program” that included both symmetrical and asymmetrical responses to SDI (36).
But by the late 1980s, Gorbachev took a restrained approach due to a Soviet perception that the SDI threat was diminishing, according to Savranskaya. She further argues that SDI did not play a major role in getting Gorbachev to agree to substantial nuclear arms reductions, which is confirmed by declassified Politburo meeting minutes in the context of the decision to de-link SDI from intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) negotiations. While the perception of threat had undoubtably changed in the late 1980s, this chapter does not address why the Soviet Union maintained linkage between SDI and Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) into the beginning of the 1990s. Nevertheless, it compellingly challenges the notion that there was a homogenous view of and reaction to SDI within the Kremlin. The chapter furthermore effectively captures the political forces within the Soviet government that shaped the Kremlin’s approach to SDI through the end of the Cold War.
The lack of consensus within the United States and the Soviet Union concerning SDI extended to US allies as well. Notably, even though the feasibility of comprehensive ballistic missile defense was a contentious issue, several of the authors reveal that US allies took the program very seriously. The implications of SDI for transatlantic security were at the forefront of the minds of European officials. Indeed, for Britain and France, there was cause for concern that any build-up in missile defense technologies could adversely affect the credibility of their relatively small nuclear deterrents. Edoardo Andreoni stresses that UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher felt compelled to carefully balance her overriding objectives of staying close to the United States and defending the vital importance of nuclear deterrence in the face of Reagan’s nuclear abolitionist rhetoric associated with SDI.[7] Ilaria Parisi points to French anxieties about medium-sized powers not being able to compete in a new arena of the arms race ushered in by SDI.[8] The non-nuclear members of the alliance also worried about the consequences of a US build-up of strategic defenses for the American security guarantee of European security. Andreas Lutsch emphasizes that West German officials viewed US nuclear deterrence as “essential to it survival.”[9] Even so, shared concerns did not translate into a collective response to SDI. While Britain and West Germany formally participated in SDI, France did not. And participation in SDI did not equate to allies endorsing Reagan’s expansive missile defense vision.
Security considerations were not the only factors motivating allied participation in SDI. What emerges from several chapters is that transatlantic alliance member-states also viewed SDI as an economic and industrial issue. Marilena Gala notes that SDI involvement offered the promise of helping European states, such as Italy, “catch up with the most advanced economies in strategically important and technologically advanced sectors.”[10] SDI therefore precipitated an even larger discussion in Europe about dependence on US technologies. In response to SDI, Parisi details French President Francois Mitterrand’s establishment of a cooperative European high-technology endeavor called Eureka. When viewed from the standpoint of technology cooperation, the volume contributes to a body of scholarship in diplomatic history and the history of technology that discusses the United States’ use of technology as tools of cooperation and coercion with its allies.[11] It would have been beneficial if more of the authors addressed the fact that US export control restrictions seriously impeded the transfer of SDI technology.[12] What precisely US officials wanted to gain from involving various allies could have received greater consideration as well.
The final section of the volume establishes that SDI was not just a matter for debate among political elites. It also mobilized citizen-activists who were promoting peace and advocating an anti-nuclear agenda.[13] And SDI complicated the work of these various groups. Before Reagan’s “Star Wars” speech in March 1983, anti-nuclear activists on both sides of the Atlantic were already pushing back against US nuclear modernization, including the deployment of new intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Europe. In this context, Angela Santese’s chapter presents Reagan’s SDI speech as part of a “peace offensive” that was intended to pacify the anti-nuclear backlash.[14] She concludes that this was “effective in reassuring domestic public opinion” (201). But Jonathan Hogg and Patrick Burke stress that SDI also led to vocal opposition among activists to placing weapons in space.[15]
This issue points to one of the great SDI paradoxes for the Reagan administration: while it pledged that SDI constituted a more moral defense that was not based on the threat of nuclear annihilation (which had strong rhetorical appeal), delivering on this promise required the deployment of weapons in space, which was widely opposed. Controversy over the space weapons issue was driven, in part, by the perception that space had long been preserved as a region of peaceful activities. Indeed, the widespread military usage of space by the superpowers, and US allies by extension, was lost on the general public. Navigating the troubled waters of divergent perceptions of the implications of SDI for the arms race more broadly, and the weaponization of space specifically, proved to be a substantial challenge for the Reagan administration.[16]
The volume could have devoted greater attention to the motivations of US leaders for inviting allies to participate in SDI. The archival record shows that both technological and political reasons (with greater weight attached to the latter) were important factors for them. In addition, the volume could have more fully highlighted the fact that SDI remained a contentious issue in transatlantic affairs into the early 1990s. While the controversy subsided as East-West relations improved, the issue of deploying space-based interceptors, called Brilliant Pebbles, generated concerns among US NATO allies well into the presidency of George H.W. Bush.[17] On the technological front, the limited benefits from foreign participation seemed to substantiate the early warnings of some European officials that the United States would not, in fact, be willing to share sensitive SDI technologies.[18] It would therefore have been worthwhile to consider both the immediate and long-term effects of SDI on the transatlantic alliance moving into the post-Cold War era.
NATO and the Strategic Defence Initiative is a valuable contribution to the scholarship on the history of transatlantic security, US foreign relations, and history of technology. It will also be of keen interest to policy-focused scholars who want to better understand the transatlantic alliance dynamics surrounding missile defense and arms control. Since the volume’s publication, even more documents have been released that add significant nuance to the chapters in this collection, underscoring the fact that SDI’s history is far from complete. The rigor of scholarship based on an impressive array of primary sources will guarantee the volume a prominent place in the cannon on the international history of SDI.
Aaron Bateman is an Assistant Professor of History and International Affairs at George Washington University. He is the author of Weapons in Space: Technology, Politics, and the Rise and Fall of the Strategic Defense Initiative (MIT Press, 2024).
[1] For other works on the international history of SDI, see Aaron Bateman, Weapons in Space: Technology, Politics, and the Rise and Fall of the Strategic Defense Initiative (MIT Press, 2024); Ralph L. Dietl, The Strategic Defense Initiative: Ronald Reagan, NATO Europe, and the Nuclear and Space Talks, 1981–1988 (Lexington Books, 2018). One of the earliest works on the international dimensions of SDI is Peter Westwick, “The International History of the Strategic Defense Initiative: American Influence and Economic Competition in the Late Cold War,” Centaurus 52:4 (2010): 338-351.
[2] Luc-André Brunet, “Introduction: The Strategic Defence Initiative and the Atlantic Alliance in the 1980s,” in Brunet, ed., NATO and the Strategic Defence Initiative: A Transatlantic History of the Star Wars Programme (Routledge, 2023): 1-13, 1.
[3] See Bateman, Weapons in Space; Dietl, The Strategic Defense Initiative; Ori Rabinowitz, “‘Arrow’ Mythology Revisited: The Curious Case of the Reagan Administration, Israel, and SDI Cooperation,” The International History Review 43:6 (2021): 1312-1329.
[4] James Graham Wilson, “Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative,” in Brunet, ed., NATO and the Strategic Defence Initiative: 15-34, 16.
[5] See Bateman, Weapons in Space, chapter 2.
[6] Svetlana Savranskaya, “Soviet Response to the Strategic Defense Initiative,” in Brunet, ed., NATO and the Strategic Defence Initiative: 35-55.
[7] Edoardo Andreoni, “Britain, SDI, and the United States, 1983–1986: A Guarded Relationship,” in Brunet, ed., NATO and the Strategic Defence Initiative: 57-72, here 61.
[8] Ilaria Parisi, “France’s Reaction Towards the Strategic Defence Initiative (1983–1986): Transforming a Strategic Threat into a Technological Opportunity,” in Brunet, ed., NATO and the Strategic Defence Initiative: 113-128, here 124.
[9] Andreas Lutsch, “Germany and SDI, 1983–1986: Anchoring US Extended Nuclear Deterrence and Westbindung for an Offense-Defense Future,” in Brunet, ed., NATO and the Strategic Defence Initiative: 73-94, 73.
[10] Marilena Gala, “Italy and the SDI Project: Envisioning a Technological Breakthrough for the Whole Alliance,” in Brunet, ed., NATO and the Strategic Defence Initiative, 106. For other works on the economic and industrial aspects of SDI, see Jon Agar, Science Policy under Thatcher (UCL Press, 2019); Bateman, Weapons in Space; Anthony Eames, “‘A Corruption of British Science?’: The Strategic Defense Initiative and British Technology Policy,” Technology and Culture 62:3 (2021): 812-838.
[11] For other works on this general topic, see John Krige, Sharing Knowledge, Shaping Europe: US Technological Collaboration and Nonproliferation (MIT Press, 2016); John Krige, American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe (MIT Press, 2006).
[12] See Bateman, Weapons in Space, chapter 6; Mario Daniels and John Krige, Knowledge Regulation and National Security in Postwar America (University of Chicago Press, 2022).
[13] For another work that encompasses both of these perspectives, see Susan Colbourn, Euromissiles: The Nuclear Weapons That Nearly Destroyed NATO (Cornell University Press, 2022).
[14] Angela Santese, “The SDI: A Further Challenge for the US Anti-Nuclear Movement,” in Brunet, ed., NATO and the Strategic Defence Initiative: 189-203, here 201.
[15] Jonathan Hogg, “SDI as a Contested Imaginary in British Culture and Society: ‘Winning in Space’,” in Brunet, ed., NATO and the Strategic Defence Initiative: 204-220; Patrick Burke, “British and International Peace Campaigning against the Strategic Defence Initiative,” in Brunet, ed., NATO and the Strategic Defence Initiative: 221-237.
[16] Bateman, Weapons in Space, chapter 3.
[17] See Bateman, Weapons in Space, chapter 7.
[18] See Westwick, “The International History of the Strategic Defense Initiative.”