Ronald Reagan, U.S. president from 1981 to 1989, was one of America’s most popular presidents, yet his hard-line policy toward the Soviet Union encountered sharp criticism. Reagan’s multibillion-dollar Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), the technological pursuit of defensive weapons in space that critics dubbed “Star Wars” (after the popular science fiction movie), received particularly virulent criticism. Some argued that the system was wasteful and ineffective; others claimed that it would violate the 1972 U.S.-Soviet Antiballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, which limited defensive systems.

In the following viewpoint, taken from a March 23, 1988, article published in the Soviet military newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star), Soviet author Dmitri Klimov explains why he thinks the SDI program is dangerous. According to Klimov, the true...