“There is only one shield against chaos,” the historian E.P. Thompson wrote in The Nation. “It is time to put it in repair.”
Richard Kreitner and The AlmanacRonald Reagan discussing the Strategic Defense Initiative, dubbed “Star Wars” by the media, during an Oval Office speech on March 23, 1983 (Wikimedia Commons/White House)
Proposed by President Reagan thirty-two years ago today, the Strategic Defense Initiative (a k a “Star Wars”) was widely derided by critics as either unwise or impossible. In “The Real Meaning of Star Wars” (March 9, 1985), the great English historian and anti-nuke activist E.P. Thompson wrote that it was also immoral.
There will never be an impermeable shield against nuclear evil. There is—and there has been for forty years—only one shield against chaos: that pitifully weak and yet somehow indestructible shield of the human conscience. It is as full of holes as a sieve, but it has held off chaos for forty years. It is time to put it in repair.
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Richard KreitnerTwitterRichard Kreitner is a contributing writer and the author of Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America's Imperfect Union. His writings are at richardkreitner.com.
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