Excessive pessimism: a side effect of Potomac Fever?

The Space Review ^ | 06/13/05 | Taylor Dinerman

[KevinDavis]

Writing about the national and international reaction to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, Winston Churchill wrote, “Great, judicious and well-considered steps are thus sometimes at first received with public incomprehension.” In recent history this has been perfectly exemplified by what happened after Ronald Reagan gave the March 1983 speech in which he launched the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars to its detractors). Except for a few true believers the general attitude in Washington was that it was typical Reaganite foolishness and that nothing would ever come of it.

Paul Lettow’s recent book Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons clears up a few of the ongoing questions about the origins and the politics of the missile defense debate. First of all he makes it clear that, once and for all, the impetus for the project came from Reagan himself, not from Edward Teller or from Reagan’s political advisors. Reagan really did mean what he said about both getting rid of nuclear weapons entirely and sharing the results of the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization’s (today’s Missile Defense Agency) technology with Soviet Russia.

That President Reagan hated nuclear weapons and the Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) doctrine was no secret. However, what was not evident at the time was how little support he had for his ideas inside his own White House. Not only was the State Department mostly opposed to the project, but his own National Security Advisor, Robert McFarlane, was extremely pessimistic about the whole concept.

[KevinDavis]

It seems that the pessimism has been spread here.... It is a bad disease to have...

[KevinDavis]

[Mind-numbed Robot]

The fact that the USSR turned down Reagan's offer to share the technology once it was developed tells a lot about the mindset of the Soviets. They didn't trust Reagan because they knew that they themselves could not have been trusted under similar circumstances. Their projection even then was revealing of their true selves. Hillary and and the other rabid Dems still reveals themselves to us in the same way.