John Spratt: “Mr. Speaker, when Ronald Reagan launched the Strategic Defense Initiative, he made a wise decision. He decided that SDI…”

“Mr. Speaker, when Ronald Reagan launched the Strategic Defense Initiative, he made a wise decision. He decided that SDI should be non-nuclear, and he did it for good reason. SDI was not the genesis of missile defense. President Johnson had proposed a missile defense system in 1967, a system he called the Sentinel. It was to be deployed at 15 sites around the country, but it packed a nuclear warhead, and the news of its coming was not warmly welcomed. When the Nixon administration came to office, it answered the local resistance to the Sentinel by naming it the Safeguard and by reorienting its mission. Safeguard consisted of 2 interceptors: Spartan, a third-stage missile with a 1 megaton warhead, and Sprint, a shorter range missile with a warhead that produced an intense burst of neutrons. Both of them were radar-guided. Neither was accurate enough for what we call today hit-to-kill, but with a 1-megaton warhead, the Spartan did not need hit-to-kill. The lethal range for the x-rays generated by its warhead above the atmosphere was several kilometers. These systems were flight-tested often, and compiled an unimpressive record, but there was one flaw that really did it in.”