Word: sdi
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Both keynote speakers yesterday invoked memories of their undergraduate days at Harvard. Sporting a Harvard tie, Weinberger defended President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) in his address yesterday afternoon...
Weinberger said that critics of SDI ignore theimportance of finding new ways to deter theSoviets. "The inability of our critics to offersatisfactory answers has driven them to takerefuge in narrow budgetary wrangling and criticismof our scientific abilities," said Weinberger, whohas been one of SDI's most outspoken proponents...
...SDI is not only something we should do, wehave to do this," he said...
...launched on a Delta rocket tracked and targeted another rocket and then maneuvered to collide with a satellite. The demonstration, however, was somewhat rigged: the rocket orbits were preprogrammed, and a reflector on the target rocket magnified its image 1,000 times. Nevertheless, Air Force Lieut. General James Abrahamson, SDI's director, argues that the $150 million demonstration proved it is feasible for a smart rock to locate a missile shrouded in its own exhaust plume and track other objects in space. Although he says Delta 180 fell within the strict ABM guidelines, SDI supporters argue that the broad interpretation...
...setting up the SDI project, President Reagan signed a directive requiring that the system be "cost effective at the margin." Translation: adding new defenses must be cheaper than it would cost the Soviets to deploy missiles to counter them. Critics charge that hastily embarking on a smart- rocks system is a way to evade this requirement. "Phased deployment is an effort to obfuscate the 'cost-effective' argument," says Spurgeon Keeny, president of the Arms Control Association. "Supporters will concede that Phase 1 isn't cost effective but will argue that the ultimate, undefined SDI system would be." With so little...