You'll need to do a helluva lot better than a book review in Salon written by the United Nations correspondent for the Nation. LOL
I've started reading the stuff on the Jerry Pournell site. He seems to be the archivist for the American SDI initiative. There's simply too much there to read in one day. There is no doubt, however, that one of the goals of SDI was to bankrupt the Soviet Union, even if the technology didn't work in the short run.