President Reagan Is Right: The United States Needs To Deploy Strategic Defenses ‘Now More Than Ever’

(Washington, D.C.): In an exclusive videotaped address to a Center for Security Policy roundtable marking the tenth anniversary of the announcement of the Strategic Defense Initiative, President Ronald Reagan will challenge the Clinton Administration and the Congress tomorrow to end America’s absolute vulnerability to ballistic missile attack. President Reagan — who launched the SDI program on 23 March 1983 — will say, in part:

"Now more than ever it is vital that the United States not back down from its efforts to develop and deploy strategic defenses. It is technologically feasible, strategically necessary and morally imperative. For if our nation and our precious freedoms are worth defending with the threat of annihilation, we are surely worth defending by defensive means that ensure our survival."

 

The Center for Security Policy roundtable will address the question of what there is to show for the $32 billion invested in strategic defenses to date — and where the program to defend the United States against missile strikes should go from here. The discussion comes against the backdrop of the Clinton Administration’s plan to reduce funding for SDI by roughly 40% in Fiscal Year 1994 and rapid proliferation of ballistic missile and nuclear technology around the world.

Featured participants will include past and present top policy-makers responsible for formulating and executing the strategic defense program. Among them will be: former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger; President Reagan’s Science Advisor Dr. George Keyworth III; Robert Bell, Senior Director for Defense and Arms Control at the National Security Council; Ambassador Henry Cooper and Maj. Gen. Malcolm O’Neill, the former director and acting director of the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization, respectively; Rep. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee; Dr. Larry Gershwin, National Intelligence Officer for Strategic Programs at the Central Intelligence Agency; and Richard Perle and Lawrence Korb, former Assistant Secretaries of Defense.