The graphics that won a war

Forty years ago, on March 23rd 1983, President Ronald Reagan startled the world by unveiling the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI). The plan was revolutionary in that it proposed a programme that would cultivate a defensive barrier, much of it in outer space, that would shield the US against enemy nuclear attack.

The previous doctrine had been Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), to convince possible enemies that any attack would be met with a retaliation that would destroy them. The USA and the USSR trained nuclear missiles at each other from silos and submarines, and armed strategic bombers stood ready to launch if incoming enemy missiles were detected.

The new US policy was to use advanced technology to construct a nuclear shield to deflect and destroy enemy missiles before they could reach their targets. It was to include X-Ray lasers, neutral particle beam weapons, electromagnetic rail guns, kinetic kill vehicles and terminal phase defence to destroy warheads as they re-entered the atmosphere and before they could detonate. It was breath-taking in scope and alarmed the Left to the point of near hysteria. They described it as impossible science fiction, and dubbed it “Star Wars.”

The Soviets did not think so. When Gorbachev met Reagan at the Reykjavik summit in 1986, the top item on his agenda was that the US must abandon the SDI. He knew that the Soviets had neither the technology nor the resources to undertake, or to overcome, such a project.

Oleg Gordievsky, head of the KGB’s London station but secretly working for MI6, briefed Reagan not to concede on the SDI. He told the President that it would win the Cold War and that the USSR would fold if the US stood firm on it. The summit ended without agreement because the SDI was the one thing that Reagan would not budge on.

The US began initial work on key parts of the project, with graphics showing how it would develop and work. Larger than any technology gap was the graphics gap, with Soviet strategists appalled at depictions of what they would have to confront. In the event, the programme succeeded without needing to be implemented. As Gordievsky had predicted, the USSR folded three years after the failed Reykjavik summit. The iron curtain and the Berlin Wall came down, and the USA has won the Cold War.

A determined President, backed by conviction as well as technology and resources, had faced the enemy down and won. And graphics played no small part in that victory.