Trump’s ‘Iron Dome for America’ Is Axiomatically the Opposite of the Reagan-LaRouche Strategic Defense Initiative

by Dennis Small

[Print version of this article]

Feb. 8—When President Donald Trump signed his Executive Order to establish an “Iron Dome for America,” on Jan. 27, it was widely misrepresented in the media, by friend and foe alike, as being a modern equivalent of President Ronald Reagan’s March 23, 1983 nationally-televised announcement of his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)—often foolishly referred to as “Star Wars.” For example, a Jan. 30 article in Financial Times stated that the Trump proposal is not akin to Israel’s “Iron Dome,” but “is actually much closer to Ronald Reagan’s so-called Star Wars program, launched in 1983 at the height of the cold war.” Even Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova failed to draw the necessary distinction in Jan. 31 comments that Trump’s plan would expand missile defenses “to a scale comparable to Reagan’s ‘Star Wars.’ ”

Since the essential features of Reagan’s SDI policy were designed by Lyndon LaRouche, we provide below key quotes from each, to orient the reader to two crucial distinctions: 1) the goal of the Reagan-LaRouche SDI was to make nuclear weapons obsolete, not entrench their use or preserve a second-strike capability; and 2) the pathway charted by the Reagan-LaRouche SDI was of verified cooperation, not confrontation, between the United States and the Soviet Union. This was premised on the view that there are common interests of Mankind around which a new security architecture can be built. The Trump proposal is notoriously based on the opposite view: seeking to impose the U.S.’s hegemonic position against hell or high water—both of which now loom on the horizon. (Emphasis has been added to the quotes below to highlight these distinctions.)

The Trump Executive Order of Jan. 27:

“(c) The United States will guarantee its secure second-strike capability…

“(iii) Development and deployment of proliferated space-based interceptors capable of boost-phase intercept…

“(vi) Development and deployment of capabilities to defeat missile attacks prior to launch and in the boost phase…

“(viii) Development and deployment of non-kinetic capabilities to augment the kinetic defeat of ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks…”

Reagan’s March 23, 1983 speech:

“What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack; that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reach our own soil or that of our allies?… Isn’t it worth every investment necessary to free the world from the threat of nuclear war? We know it is!…

“I clearly recognize that defensive systems have limitations and raise certain problems and ambiguities. If paired with offensive systems, they can be viewed as fostering an aggressive policy and no one wants that. But with these considerations firmly in mind, I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace; to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete…. We seek neither military superiority nor political advantage. Our only purpose—one all people share—is to search for ways to reduce the danger of nuclear war.”

LaRouche’s Jan. 20, 1983 address on “An Anti-Imperialist Military Policy”:

LaRouche delivered a public address in Washington, D.C. two months prior to Reagan’s SDI announcement, in which he explained his proposal for the use of new physical principles to radically transform the world security and development architecture:

“Now, what I’ve proposed is a solution to the military side of this problem. My proposal is: eliminate the superiority of thermonuclear weapons as the final weapon, or an absolute weapon. They are not an absolute weapon: We have had, over the same 20 years, actual weapons systems, and potential weapon systems, which can destroy thermonuclear missiles, ballistic missiles, in the stratosphere. We have had systems which could provide point-defense, to defend cities, or to defend missile sites or other targets, from an incoming warhead. Most recently, the Soviet Union, in the past six years or so at least, has been developing a set of weapons systems which could do this by means of laser-like beams, beam weapons….

“So, therefore, I have proposed that we change our negotiations on arms with Moscow in the following way. One, we agree to independently, but in parallel, develop and deploy anti-missile defensive beam-weapon and supplementary systems. We agree, two, to manage the progress in such deployment, to such effect that we do not create a strategic imbalance of critical significance during the process of deployment. Three, that we then proceed on the basis of that agreement to a program of eliminating thermonuclear weapons. Four, that we agree that as we put this in place, that if any third nation attempts to launch one or any number of thermonuclear weapons, we will jointly destroy those launched weapons at that time—that we agree, in short, to free the world from more than 20 years of thermonuclear terror.

“There is no other way to go. It will be impossible in any negotiation to go so far with reducing the number of warheads, that either the United States or the Soviet Union would actually give up what it considers the capability to obliterate the other by nuclear means. So, therefore, disarmament leads nowhere. It accomplishes nothing, because we cannot eliminate thermonuclear missiles except by going to a weapons-system deployment that makes them relatively obsolete….

“If we commit ourselves to this technological revolution—and it is a technological revolution in modes of production as well as it is in military science—and we use this technology to assist the development of developing countries, to increase the general welfare of mankind on this planet … if we commit ourselves to these things which are properly the common aims of mankind, perhaps in that great effort we can find a solution. And, therefore, I propose that we adopt this policy, a beam-weapon development policy, a crash program to do this, to negotiate with the Soviets on this question, as I’ve indicated, and to couple this to a plan, an effort to restore technologically progressive economic growth, and to finally remove the hideous effects of centuries of British and other imperialism that blight the conditions of life of people in the developing sector.”