Resolving a Star Wars Skirmish

The President papers over a heated dispute on weapons testing

Addressing the annual meeting of legislators from the NATO nations in San Francisco last week, Secretary of State George Shultz emphasized that the U.S. plans no change in its Star Wars testing program. So what else is new? Just this: before Shultz could make that statement, Ronald Reagan had to settle a bitter dispute among his senior advisers.The dustup briefly threatened to scuttle the Antiballistic Missile Treaty of 1972.

Earlier this month National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane astonished many arms-control experts by announcing on NBC's Meet the Press that wide-open testing and even development of the space-based Strategic Defense Initiative, as...

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