Intersecting argument & international relations: an argument criticism of the strategic defense initiative

In March 1983, President Ronald Reagan delivered the Address to the Nation on Defense and National Security, announcing that the United States would begin development of a space-based missile defense system (the Strategic Defense Initiative) that would render nuclear weapons obsolete. Widely derided as an impossibility from the outset, to speak of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) is to invoke the image of a haphazard executive whose ill-conceived faith in technological salvation heralded the beginning of a final, dangerous phase of interstate competition. Complicating that view, this thesis argues that the SDI, as public argument with technical ramifications, fundamentally changed the rhetorical terrain of the Cold War, creating the conditions under which the Soviet collapse at the 1986 Reykjavik Summit became possible.