The Strategic Defense Initiative, also called SDI, was first announced publicly by U.S. President Ronald Reagan in March

of 1983. The SDI was created with the intention of ending the nuclear standoff between the United

States and the Soviet Union. A concept called mutually assured destruction, or Mad, had become the leading military defense doctrine,

meaning that if one side nuked the other side, the losing side would have fail safes in place

that would launch all or most of their weapons, destroying their attacker either way,

and potentially ending the world as well as a byproduct.

So in an attempt to sidestep mad, Reagan gave the go-ahead on SDI, and in the following year,

the SDI organization became a wing within the United States Department of Defense.

This organization was tasked with developing defenses that could,

in short, knock down or otherwise diffuse intercontinental and submarine-launched ballistic missiles.

If the Soviets launched a nuke, the U.S. wanted to have ways to zap its propellant with a laser,

fry its guidance systems with a microwave beam,

or knock it out of thin air with another missile.

The frustration that led to the creation of this government organization is easy to understand,

even in retrospect.

Imagine that you are the president, you are Ronald Reagan,

and you, like he did, are visiting

the Cheyenne Mountain Complex in El Paso County, Colorado in 1979.

The Cheyenne Mountain Complex is a military bunker built inside a mountain, so it's one of the safest

possible places to be in the event of a nuclear war.

And this place is filled to the brim with systems that can detect and track Soviet warheads

with very high accuracy. This was incredibly high technology, especially for the time.

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