But over the course of a few years, a transformation occurred. The hawk of hawks decided to wage peace. When Mr. Reagan came to Moscow, where I was then stationed, dropping the Big One was the furthest thing from his mind. Instead, he could be found strolling through Red Square with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, almost arm in arm. Softened by a peace-driven Soviet leader, prodded by NATO, the old movie star dispensed with sabre-rattling, took the route of diplomacy, and helped engineer the great thaw. Dubya_gal, this really did deserve a "BARF" alert... This author uses so many perjorative (sp?) terms intending to make either Reagan or Dubya to look like lunatics (Star Wars was just a stupid scheme? That never could have worked??? I recall Soviet KGB agents saying that Star Wars was the last straw: the Soviets couldn't keep up and Star Wars put the nail in their coffin... that is when Reagan made it clear he wasn't going to negotiate it away as the Demos would have urged), it even puts the journalism profession to shame.
Yeah, Gorbachev was the real reason the Soviets were brought to heel... Yeah, Reagan changed completely because of Gorby's persuasion and the jaw-boning by those NATO statesmen... Yeah, RIGHT! What a friggin' idiot!
It appears that the critics of "star wars" have not been paying attention to the many recent successful tests on SDI hardware. In the past two years, we have successfully "hit a bullit with a bullit" several times. Sea and air based directed energy systems are knocking missiles out of the sky. Reagan never said that this technology was ready when he announced SDI. He challenged the scientific community to develope these systems. The results from two decades of R&D are finally coming to fruition and proving that it does work. And these are just the systems that the Pentagon has seen fit to let us know about. There is a very large serving of crow coming out of the oven for all of the SDI nay-sayers.