The White Pill: A Tale of Good and Evil

by Michael Malice

This was the thinking behind the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). The concept was to figure out a way to stop nuclear missiles from hitting their target after they had been fired. How this was to be done was an enormously difficult question, for effectively it would be akin to shooting a bullet with another bullet after the trigger had been pulled. One of the hypothesized solutions would be defensive missiles fired from satellites, which earned the program the nickname “Star Wars.” Critics thought the program unworkable and derided the entire project to be an enormous waste of money. As Thatcher herself told Reagan at their Camp David meeting, “Even if an SDI system proved 95% successful—a significant success rate—over sixty million people would still die from those weapons that got through.”[cdlxxxiii] But what if it did work? In that event, with the Soviet Union’s missiles rendered powerless, the United States would have a de facto nuclear monopoly against the USSR, just as it had in the brief window after World War II before Stalin got the bomb. For Gorbachev this was of course completely unacceptable, as he made plain both publicly and to Thatcher directly.