On March 23, 1983, US President Ronald Reagan announced the start of construction of a large-scale missile defense system on earth and in space, capable of intercepting and destroying Soviet ballistic missiles.
In a famous television speech, Reagan noted that the Star Wars Strategic Defense Initiative would be able to protect the American homeland from any nuclear threat, announcing that he had authorized “a comprehensive and intensive effort to conduct a long-term program of research and development to achieve our ultimate goal of eliminating the threat emanating from strategic missiles with nuclear warheads.
This speech marked the beginning of the Strategic Defense Initiative program, which provided for the creation of a powerful anti-missile dome, the main components of which were to be placed in near-Earth orbit.
The main American goal of the Strategic Defense Initiative is to achieve complete dominance in outer space, allowing the destruction of ballistic missiles and warheads at all stages of their flight.
At first, the Star Wars program was an exclusive project for the Americans, but soon the US NATO allies joined in.
This program significantly exceeded in its complexity all previous defense projects, and only a small part of its components had to use military technologies known and somewhat available at that time, while the basis of the Star Wars strike force was the development of weapons on New physical principles.
Reagan’s Star Wars project attracted widespread interest from the international community, as it included the deployment of combat lasers, anti-missiles capable of destroying enemy ballistic missiles in outer space, as well as supersensors and powerful computers capable of directing lasers and interceptors. rockets.
And as it turned out later that this was just a major American ploy to draw the Soviet Union into a new, broad arms race that exhausted its capabilities, the American president said at the time that American scientists, together with their allies, began to develop a program , which could “achieve the goal of eliminating the threat posed by strategic nuclear missiles.”
By this, Reagan meant that the Star Wars program would put an end to the so-called “mutual assured destruction” doctrine, which guarantees a strategic balance and prevents the United States and the Soviet Union from thinking about starting a nuclear war, since there is a guarantee that the enemy will respond retaliatory strike.
Through this program, the United States wanted to ensure the destruction of the enemy’s power and nuclear deterrence, ensuring that he could not reach his territory, and thus gain complete superiority and the ability to start a nuclear war without fear of a similar retaliatory strike.
The Soviet Union at this time began to prepare a response to this new American threat. The task was entrusted to a group of Soviet scientists headed by Vice-President of the USSR Academy of Sciences Yevgeny Velikhov.
Among the response measures, it was planned to increase the security of ballistic missile launchers and carriers of strategic nuclear missiles, as well as to increase the overall capabilities of the Soviet strategic forces command and control system.
In the second direction, work was focused on neutralizing the threat of increasing the ability of Soviet strategic nuclear forces to overcome the layered missile defense system.
The decisive Soviet response was the creation of the so-called “dead hand” system, which guarantees the launch of Soviet nuclear missiles even if the enemy destroys the country’s top leadership, communications and the entire military command.
The American Strategic Defense Initiative did not go into effect, and a host of technical problems faced by the developers forced the American leadership to curtail the program ten years after its introduction.
However, the remainder of this fictitious program did not achieve any significant results, while the funds allocated from the US budget for the implementation of Star Wars were huge, estimated by some sources at $100 billion.
Source: RT