Volume 34, Number 7 · April 23, 1987
What Price Star Wars?
By Lord Zuckerman
Blundering Into Disaster: Surviving the First Century of the Nuclear Age
by Robert McNamara
Pantheon, 212 pp., $14.95
The technical ideas which underlie the SDI concept of a defensive screen over the US were generated not by the President or his chiefs of staff, but by scientists and engineers driven along by the vested interests of the weapons laboratories in which they work. Some of them must have provided the information that encouraged Caspar Weinberger to call last December for immediate preparations to deploy and SDI system. Since it was only in October that Lowell Wood, one of the leading figures in the Livermore SDI program, declared publicly that it would be years before anyone could judge whether such a system was feasible, those concerned must have made remarkable progress in the intervening two months. If the call for early deployment turns out not to have been a political gimmick, Mr. Weinberger will have dealt American and Western defense a blow from which it may take long to recover.
Review, 4672 words
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