The Soviet Perspective on the Strategic Defense Initiative; Foreign Policy Report

Washington DC: Pergamon-Brassey's International Defense Publishers, 1987. First Printing [Stated]. Trade paperback. Very good. xii, 95, [1] pages. Footnotes. Embossed stamp on page iii. Inscribed and dated by the author on the title page to Robert Georgine! Robert A. Georgine (1932-2011) was the former president, chairman and chief executive officer of the Union Labor Life Insurance Company. He joined the Wood, Wire and Metal Lathers International Union. Georgine was elected president of the Wood, Wire and Metal Lathers in 1970. In 1985 he was elected to the AFL-CIO Executive Council. Stamp of Building and Construction Trades Department inside back cover. Includes Preface, Acknowledgments, Summary Overview, Introduction, and Conclusions. Also includes chapters on The Soviet Mentality and the Party's Struggle; The Military and Ideological Consequences of SDI; The Technological and Economic Ramifications of SDI; Possible Soviet Responses to SDI; and Conclusions. Dmitry Mikheyev was born in the Soviet Union in 1941 and received a Ph.D. in Physics from the Moscow State University in 1970. After trying to flee the Soviet Union he was arrested and tried for treason. After serving a six year sentence in a hard labor camp for political dissidents, he was expelled. He emigrated to the U.S. and became a citizen in 1985. The author's analysis throws light upon aspects of Soviet military policy that are insufficiently considered, if not ignored altogether, in most publications. His work is a creative effort to link social, psychological, and public policy considerations with illuminating results.
The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was a proposed missile defense system intended to protect the United States from attack by ballistic strategic nuclear weapons (intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-launched ballistic missiles). The concept was first announced on March 23, 1983 by President Ronald Reagan, a vocal critic of the doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD), which he described as a "suicide pact", and called upon US scientists and engineers to develop a system that would render nuclear weapons obsolete. The Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) was set up in 1984 within the US Department of Defense to oversee development. A wide array of advanced weapon concepts, including lasers, particle beam weapons and ground- and space-based missile systems were studied, along with various sensor, command and control, and high-performance computer systems that would be needed to control a system consisting of hundreds of combat centers and satellites spanning the entire globe and involved in a very short battle. A number of these concepts were tested through the late 1980s, and follow-on efforts and spin-offs continue to this day. 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. After the publication of the APS report, SDIs budget was repeatedly cut. By the early 1990s, with the Cold War ending and nuclear arsenals being rapidly reduced, political support for SDI collapsed. SDI officially ended in 1993, when the Bill Clinton administration redirected the efforts towards theatre ballistic missiles and renamed the agency the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO).