States to stockpile weapons, to use in the event of a nuclear attack from the Soviet Un-ion or other nuclear super-power. A few years later, during the Nixon Presidency in 1968, the United States, USSR, and a number of other states signed the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. The NPT was designed to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and technology from the super-power states to the still-developing states. (Winkler 1999, 182)In 1972, four years after NPT was signed and ten years after the Cuban missile crisis, the United States, in conjunction with the USSR, signed the ABM Treaty. The ABM treaty was designed to regulate the number of anti-ballistic missile systems, or defense shields, of both the United States and the Soviet Union to two, and later agree-ments brought that number down to one. (Winkler 1999, 187) It did nothing, however, to regulate the number of missiles a state could possess. During all this time, however, US-Soviet relations remained tense. The Ameri-can government taught the American people to live in fear of a possible pre-emptive nuclear strike by the Soviets. According to author Allan Winkler, this is when then-President Ronald Reagan began to design his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) pro-gram, or Star Wars, as many people referred to it as. (204) There were a number of early proposals for how the Star Wars program would work. A few of them include:1.Using chemical lasers that would emit infrared radiation that could then be amplified and aimed at enemy targets. (Winkler 1999, 205)2.The physicist Edward Teller, one of the creators of the hydrogen bomb, proposed a program titled Excalibur, which would be an X-ray laser powered by a nuclear bomb. (Winkler 1999, 204, 205)3.Particle beams consisting of streams of atomic or subatomic particles, which would be used to knock out incoming targets. (Winkler 1999, 205)4.Scientist Gerald Yonas proposed program entitled Jedi Concept, which would ...
