Interlude: In a Galaxy Far, Far Away…
Excerpts from a televised speech given by President Far Shooter to the nation on June 18, 1985:
My fellow Americans, thank you for sharing your time with me tonight. The subject I wish to discuss with you, peace and national security, is both timely and important. Tomorrow morning I will present a radically revised defense budget to Congress, a budget that must pass, for the fate of the entire world is at stake. That is why I am asking you to face the most basic duty that any President and any people share: the duty to protect and strengthen the peace.
The defense policy of the United States is based on a simple premise: The United States does not start fights. We will never be an aggressor. We maintain our strength in order to deter and defend against aggression - to preserve freedom and peace.
Since the dawn of the atomic age, we have sought to reduce the risk of war by maintaining a strong deterrent and by seeking genuine arms control. This strategy of deterrence has not changed. It still works. But what it takes to maintain deterrence has changed. It took one kind of military force to deter an attack when we had far more nuclear weapons than any other power; it takes another kind now that the Soviets, for example, have enough accurate and powerful nuclear weapons to destroy virtually all of our missiles on the ground.
For twenty years, the Soviet Union has been accumulating enormous military might. They didn't stop when their forces exceeded all requirements of a legitimate defensive capability. And they haven't stopped now.
During the past decade and a half, the Soviets have built up a massive arsenal of new strategic nuclear weapons — weapons that can strike directly at the United States.
As an example, the United States introduced its last new intercontinental ballistic missile, the Minuteman III, in 1969, and we are now dismantling our even older Titan missiles. But what has the Soviet Union done in these intervening years? Well, since 1969, the Soviet Union has built five new classes of ICBM's, and upgraded these eight times. As a result, their missiles are much more powerful and accurate than they were several years ago and they continue to develop more, while ours are increasingly obsolete.
There was a time when we were able to offset superior Soviet numbers with higher quality. But today they are building weapons as sophisticated and modern as our own. I could have asked Congress to close this gap, to match every one of their missiles with one of our own. But I now believe that this is a fool’s game. It is not without a certain sense of justice that our current deterrent policy of Mutually Assured Destruction has the acronym of M.A.D. In recent months my advisors, consisting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and over a score of the best scientists and engineers in the country, led by Professor Infra Stellar, the father of the H-Bomb, have come up with an alternative, called the Strategic Defense Initiative, or S.D.I. With it, we can end the threat of nuclear war forever, by countering the awesome Soviet missile threat with measures that are defensive, letting us turn to the very strengths in technology that spawned our great industrial base and that have given us the quality of life we enjoy today.
What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their safety did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?
I am so confident that this system will end the Cold War once and for all that I am willing to share its design with the Soviets, once we get it into operation. After all, if they have nothing to fear from us, why would they have any reason to attack us?
Of course, this vision of peace will not be cheap, and there are many in this country still wedded to the notion of our two nations locked in a tense standoff ending in a final shootout, like the ending of many a Western that I starred in when I was an actor. Well it seems that nobody wants to watch Westerns anymore. Maybe that is a sign that we wish to find other, better ways to resolve our conflicts.
To the Americans watching me speak, I ask of you: is this a vision worthy of your taxpayer dollars, and worthy of the support of your Representative and Senator? And to Secretary-General Andropov, who I know is also watching this speech, I ask you to prove me wrong when I called your domain an ‘evil empire’, to prove that you are no longer the man you once were, by lending your support to the Strategic Defense Initiative, a means of finally seeing true international peace in our lifetimes.
My fellow Americans, tonight we are launching an effort which holds the promise of changing the course of human history. There will be risks. But I believe we can do it. As we cross this threshold, I ask for your prayers and your support. Thank you, good night and may God or Goddess bless you.