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Star Wars Argumentative Analysis

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When Ronald Reagan unveiled the Strategic Defense Initiative, the whole world laughed. The movie Star Wars had just come out, and the description of this new laser defense system seemed more at home on the screen of a science fiction movie than in the arsenal of the American military. People today still call the plan absurd, but is it really? Well, the technology is still not quite to the level that Ronald Reagan had hoped in his speech, but it is not as far-fetched as one would think. In fact, this idea actually has paved the way for very similar systems that have been protecting Americans and other civilians for years now. So, what was the Strategic Defense Initiative and how did it evolve, how was it accepted, and what equivalent do …show more content…

It was immediately dubbed “Star Wars” by the media, after the movie that had come out just a little while before (fun fact: the term “Star Wars” is attributed to a United States senator, Ted Kennedy, who called it that in an article in the Washington Post. Other than the initial laughter, and a little confusion as to how this was feasible, the United States discovered that there were worse problems with the plans- that it crossed international treaty that the United States had agreed to. One such treaty was the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (or SALT) that said that the United States or the USSR would not be allowed to build up an additional arsenal of military equipment, especially missiles. The United States got around that Diplomatic nightmare by passing it off as a defense system, and promising that they would not be used for offense (something that Mikhail Gorbachev did not believe). The other treaty that this missile defense system ignored was the The Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which stated that no country was allowed to place any satellite or other bodies into space carrying any type of weapon of mass destruction. This caused plans to put nuclear warheads in space to be halted, but all other plans, such as the X-ray lasers and defense systems were …show more content…

Today, we have in place multiple systems that do the job that Ronald Reagan dreamed about- the two most important being the Patriot Missile Defense system, and the Defense Support Program. The Patriot Missile defense system is a short-range, mobile missile defense system that has been used in the military for quite some time now. It is carried around on the back of a military vehicle, and can detect missiles from 50 miles out (that seems like a very long distance, but most missiles travel at around 1 mile per second), and shoot them down before they get near wherever the vehicle is stationed and trying to protect. Such missile defense systems have been leased to allies, and even used in recent wars in the Middle

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