The Nation - News from April 25, 1988

Senior Pentagon officials said Defense Secretary Frank C. Carlucci is reviewing a recommendation that he sharply cut the proposed initial deployment of “Star Wars” anti-missile defenses from a system of space-based weaponry to a less costly and much less effective system of ground-based rockets, the Washington Post reported. A high-level panel directed by Robert Everett, chairman of the Pentagon’s senior scientific advisory group, has told Carlucci that a system of ground-based rockets could be deployed sooner and easier than the more ambitious system of hundreds of space- and ground-based weapons now planned for the initial phase of the Strategic Defense Initiative. If Carlucci adopted the panel’s recommendation, it would mark another scaling-back of the SDI program. Meanwhile, Carlucci, in an ABC-TV interview, rejected a report by Congress’ Office of Technology Assessment that called SDI unworkable.