دانلود کتاب ناتو و ابتکار دفاع استراتژیک – تاریخ فراآتلانتیک برنامه جنگ ستارگان

Shortly after leaving office, Ronald Reagan claimed that the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI), an anti-missile shield he first proposed in 1983 as a means of pro­tecting the United States from nuclear attack, was ‘the single most important rea­son, on the United States’ side, for the historical breakthroughs that were to occur during the next five years in the quest for peace and a better relationship with the Soviet Union’.¹ This assessment was echoed by Margaret Thatcher after the col­lapse of the USSR, as she asserted that ‘looking back, it is now clear to me that Ronald Reagan’s original decision on SDI was the single most important of his presidency’.² Few would have made such claims when Reagan first adumbrated the SDI in March 1983. Indeed, Thatcher’s Foreign Secretary, Geoffrey Howe, publicly derided the initiative as ‘a new Maginot Line of the twenty-first cen­tury’, and the term ‘Star Wars’ was used ubiquitously and unflatteringly to refer to the seemingly fanciful plan.³ Such misgivings about the American project were widely shared across NATO capitals in the 1980s, but to date these international responses to the SDI have been relatively unexplored by historians. This volume uses new archival sources and innovative methodological approaches to provide a rigorous study of allied reactions to the Strategic Defence Initiative.