The Strategic Defense Initiative: Shield Or Snare; Star Wars: The Economic Fallout; Strategic Defense and Arms Control; Star Wars and European Defence

For anyone who has missed the SDI debate and wants to catch up, the Brown volume is a useful primer. In their careful chapter on the macroeconomics of SDI, Barry Blechman and Victor Utgoff estimate the opportunity cost of a comprehensive defense as equivalent to a $570 annual tax surcharge for citizens earning $30,000 to $50,000. The Nimroody book, the result of a Council on Economic Priorities project, presents a still sharper conclusion, arguing that the Reagan SDI program "harbors . . . serious threats to the economy," especially if early contracts build political momentum behind the program. Weinberg and Barkenbus make clear their moral preference for a defense-dominated nuclear world-specifically for a defense-protected arms build-down-but they are fair-minded enough to report their surprise that not all their contributors agreed; indeed their own epilogue is as good a synthesis of the defense-offense arguments as there is anywhere. The Brauch volume disaggregates the European reaction to SDI in country-by-country chapters-helpful source material, if probably more than most readers will need.