The general public's attitude toward nuclear weapons has over the course of four decades has turned extremely negative. This trend in public thinking about nuclear weapons is reflected in most opinion surveys. Coincidentally, during the 1980s American churches became actively “anti-nuclear.” The Reagan Administration, well aware of the negative trend in public attitudes toward nuclear weapons, initiated two separate but complementary initiatives. First, the Reagan Administration launched the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). The SDI was intended to determine the technical feasibility of rendering ballistic missiles “impotent and obsolete.” Second, the Reagan Administration demanded that any new strategic arms control agreements achieve significant reductions in strategic nuclear weapons. U.S. views in that regard place emphasis on ICBMs as the weapons to be reduced. In both cases the focus of attention was on ballistic missiles, to reduce through negotiations and to render impotent through active defense. These initiatives appeared to place the Reagan Administration squarely against modern ICBMs. They also constituted the basic elements in the notion of a “cooperative defense transition” wherein the U.S. and Soviet Union would move increasingly toward greater reliance on strategic defense for security. The conditions that will likely be necessary to move the Soviet Union toward a “defensive transition” will be Soviet convictions that, 1) counter-force offense can not support Soviet damage-limitation goals; and, 2) the U.S. offensive threat will not be reduced without offensive concessions on the part of the Soviet Union. Consequently, U.S. offensive modernization programs, including those for ICBMs, will be essential leverage to move the Soviet Union toward a “cooperative transition.” This places the U.S. in the politically unenviable position of endorsing a defensive transition and deep offensive reductions, but needing to sustain dynamic offensive forces programs if a cooperative transition is ever to be a possibility.
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