The Economic Rationale

The strategic rationale for research into and eventual deployment of strategic defenses was buttressed by an economic one. Although it did not emerge in the president's speech—which omitted any mention of the economic consequences of the initiative—it had already been stressed by High Frontier. Once the Fletcher panel put a price tag on the research program, however, and critics began to estimate the cost of the program (some in the range of a trillion dollars), the administration began to address the economic issue. Upon receipt of the Fletcher report, DeLauer recommended, and Weinberger endorsed, a research phase that would cost $26 billion over five years, beginning with FY1985. Critics attacked this budgetary request on several grounds. They argued that it would distort research priorities in defense by competing with programs concerned with the modernization of nuclear and conventional forces; that it would contribute further to the "militarization of research" at universities, a process already under way because of the emphasis of the Reagan budgets on military R&D; and that it would be wasteful, because too many technical questions would have to be resolved before an operational system would merit testing. Critics also cautioned that the program would divert scarce talent and industrial resources from a civilian economy that was suffering from "deindustrialization" and had become uncompetitive. The real motivation for such a rapid escalation in expenditures, some argued, was to create a constituency of contractors that would provide the program with enough momentum to make it difficult if not impossible for some future administration to scale back or curtail.^[73]   

Administration officials responded to these criticisms with several key points: SDI is based on research that has been under way for some time. Expenditure totals should therefore be regarded as increments. In other areas, research was no longer critical because new military technologies were in a development or deployment phase. The research budget for the SDI would amount to no more than a comparatively small fraction of total military research, and would make it possible, early in the 1990s, to decide whether to proceed with the development and deployment of a defensive system. Before then, it was purely speculative to try

to determine the costs of deployment. These costs, too, would in any case be spread over many years and would therefore represent a manageable fraction of the defense budget.

In addition, advocates and administration officials also emphasized the potential importance of the SDI as a source of spillover benefits for civilian high-technology industry.^[74]    Advances in computers, optical sensors, materials, and other aspects of SDI research, they suggested, would stimulate a resurgence of U.S. industry in much the same way as defense research had done in the 1950s and 1960s, and with greater indirect benefits than the more specialized mission-oriented research of the space program of the 1960s and 1970s. An office of Innovative Science and Technology was created within the SDIO to assure opportunities for broad-gauged research at universities; other efforts were made to assure that smaller, highly innovative companies would receive significant shares of the funding. Critics even wondered whether the SDI was in reality a covert way for a conservative administration to achieve a form of reindustrialization. The French government suspected that whatever the U.S. government's intention, massive support to U.S. industry would leave Europe in the lurch. President François Mitterrand therefore proposed the EUREKA project, a mainly civilian-oriented alternative to SDI.