There’s Something Sick About SDI Fantasy

The Reagan Administration wants $5.3 billion for its Strategic Defense Initiative to protect us from the Soviets. “Star Wars” is an expensive space fantasy that distracts us from real human problems that $5.3 billion could help solve. According to the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, in 1986 the average American paid $5,767 in federal taxes, of which $3,103 went to military expenses, $138 to nutrition programs and $126 to education. Only a tiny amount went to improve U.S.-Soviet relations.

SDI is not the defense that its promoters claim. It is a high-technology pseudo-solution to the anxiety and power needs of men cut off from earthly human compassion for real people.

As a psychologist, I have often seen people use pathological psychological defenses against pain and vulnerability. I have also seen executives avoid the confronting of crippling human problems in their work teams by focusing on grand schemes. The road to madness and Challenger disasters is paved with denial and avoidance of unwelcome input. Feelings, needs and fears that are denied and covered up with fake strength and illusory solutions can drive us to national sickness.

As I read and listen to arguments in favor of Star Wars, I am overcome with the eerie feeling that one gets in the presence of true madness. The presentations are so rational and technical. The need for and value of Star Wars are so matter-of-factly assumed. The advocates appear so sincere and concerned about national security. I am left with the chilling impression of being in the presence of minds that operate in a moral and emotional vacuum.

The short-range impact and the long-range consequences of sacrificial devotion to this enormously complex and expensive technological fix are not faced up to. The detailed analyses of engineering and electronics become in themselves a defense. SDI is a prime example of what psychiatrist Robert Lifton termed “psychic numbing.” Obsessional scientific and strategic ruminations that are detached from human experience become an impregnable psychological barrier against the terror and the grief that a sane mortal would feel in contemplating this crisis in human history. Ultimate concern about the potentially tragic fate of the species is soothingly replaced by trade-off analyses of how to spend money and how to deploy missiles.

If a patient talked this way in my office or a friend in my living room, I would despair for his treatability or emotional accessibility as a person. I would wonder what repressed nightmare was driving this person to close off normal human feeling and invest so suicidally in a “solution” that cost him his life.

Defenses--physiological, psychological and military--arise from real threats and legitimate attempts to survive. But pathological defenses go too far and aggravate the stress that they purport to relieve. This was stress researcher Hans Selye’s discovery about the body’s defenses and Freud’s discovery about the ego’s defenses. Now we are all being sickened by the Department of Defense’s defenses of our body politic. An intrinsic part of each of these defenses is an unconsciousness and a lack of feedback concerning the fact that the defense has become part of the problem, not the solution. How can we break this unconscious and self-reinforcing illusion that we are being helped, not hurt?

To save ourselves we must break the trance. People must learn to say, “Stop! I feel worse, not better!” The nation must learn to say, “No, we don’t want paranoid isolation, we want human connection.” Then perhaps we will begin an equally monumental and sophisticated program that we could call Strategic Human Initiative--SHI.

President Reagan proposed something like like this when he returned from the Geneva summit meeting in 1985. He called for a “fresh start” in U.S.-Soviet relations. But he did not ask for $5.3 billion to implement it. In his report to Congress about the talks with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, he said, “We understand each other better. That’s key to peace.” He promised to increase “people-to-people initiatives,” youth exchanges and cultural programs, emphasizing, “We must reduce the mistrust and suspicions between us.” SDI prevents such progress. SHI--Strategic Human Initiative--could make it happen.

H. G. Wells said that we are in a race between education and disaster. He died believing that education had lost. I hope I don’t.