Nordic wrote:Pretty easy to speculate on this one.
SDI is a scam. It doesn't work and will never work for some very basic reasons.
However it was a big big part of the Reagan nonsense, and was the biggest potential gravyy train for the war profiteer industry since the invention of the machine gun.
The whole premise of SDI is that it's literally designed to be constantly upgraded at an astronomical cost. Which is directly tied to the reason it will never actually work: an enemy can always overwhelm whatever system exists by throwing more missiles at it than the system is designed to handle.
These missiles don't even have to be real missiles, they can be decoys or any other kinds of chaff that will use up the available "attention span" of the system.
The whole goal with this system was to get it started in the first place get any first generation system in place so that they would have reason to constantly "upgrade" it for generations to come.
However all the scientists knew it was a bogus system (because to be effective againsy nuke missiles it has to be 100 percent effective but never would be) and a lot of them were very frustrated by the Reagan's admin's insistence on the damn thing being used. My dad was one of these guys but didn't work directly with SDI so he never got too - ahem - depressed about it.
And the truth is, no human is an enemy to the other human if he has not met him personally. There is no reason for any human to hate another one unless they are pathologically unresponsive to normal amounts of sympathy. You just deal with those you disagree with, avoid them or speak your mind. What was that story that on Christmas in WWI the battalions of both the US and Germany or something met for dinner, but commenced "war" the next day? Or how in Civil War battles the opposing generals would meet due to bad weather and schedule the fucking battle once the weather was more clement for death? Revolutionary war too I think.