March marked the 25th anniversary of President Ronald Reagan’s speech that launched the Strategic Defense Initiative program, one that hoped to create a defensive space shield from incoming nuclear missiles.

The anniversary took on even greater significance last weekend as President Bush visited Europe, stopping in Russia where he refused to give in to Vladimir Putin’s demands that the system not be deployed in central Europe.

To look at headlines, broadcasts, and stories from 1983, one would hardly imagine any two country’s leaders debating the option 25 years later.

From nearly the moment that President Reagan’s nationally televised speech ended that March 23rd night, he faced derision and ridicule from the left.

Ted Kennedy immediately dubbed SDI “Star Wars,” a moniker that has stuck though not carrying the same negative connotations as when Kennedy characterized President Reagan’s speech as “misleading Red-scare tactics” and “reckless.”

Some referred to SDI as “fantasy,” the stuff of Buck Rogers. Some even began calling the president “Ray guns.”

Still others took SDI seriously but critically referred to it as the beginning of another arms race, fearing a weapons race in space.

In the past month or so, two technologies President Reagan envisioned have come to the public’s attention. While it was hard to ignore the U.S. military’s decimation of a satellite with a missile, the Pentagon’s development of a ray gun did not receive as much attention.

Perhaps the most sublime weapon ever created by humankind, this ray gun featured on the March 2 episode of “60 Minutes” does not kill. Instead, the Active Denial System zaps humans with a 100,000-watt ray that, when used as intended, leaves its targets in retreat, unharmed, and in some instances laughing.

Reagan called these technologies defensive weaponry and said, once developed, they could be shared with the Soviet Union to prevent mutually assured destruction, often referred to as MAD.

Like many visionaries, President Reagan had his detractors, especially in the press.

Mark Shields criticized the president’s “Star Wars” speech in his March 25, 1983 Washington Post column, saying it did not appeal to the citizenry for what he called “patriotic sacrifice” and “unselfish national purpose” in comparison to the speeches of FDR and JFK. Continued...