Fifty-three years ago this March 23, Lyndon LaRouche’s “Beam the Bomb” program, known thereafter at the White House as the Strategic Defense Initiative under Gen. James Abrahamson, was announced by President Ronald Reagan in a nationally televised evening broadcast.
After leading a Fusion Energy Foundation publishing and organizing mobilization for beam weapons defense for six years, from 1977 through 1982, LaRouche had announced at our New Year’s 1983 national conference, that we had just “90 days more” to get a breakthrough to this program. Eighty-two days later, we got it. The President called on scientists, in the United States but also in other nations and implicitly in the Soviet Union, to collaborate to “make nuclear missiles impotent and obsolete.”
The huge scientific and technological tasks involved in “Beam the Bomb” could set off technological breakthroughs and industrial advances in countries throughout the developing sector—Lyndon LaRouche’s intention. It was also a “higher peace movement” compared to the then-widespread “nuclear freeze” movement which reacted to the imminent threat of nuclear war in Europe, with anti-nuclear ideas.
I was acting as the Fusion Energy Foundation’s Executive Director following the sudden departure of its founding ED, Dr. Morris Levit, who thought that LaRouche’s continuous direction of the FEF, on the line of achieving plasma progress by pursuing this scientific-military-political breakthrough, was holding it back.
Just as ironically, one week before March 23, EIR’s Jeffrey Steinberg and I had met on the subject in the Pentagon with a group of nine U.S. Navy officers, all of whom had military science-related tasks. All knew of, and supported, the beam defense idea; some were working on related things; yet not one thought there was any near-term prospect of its getting a go-ahead.
So, then as now, don’t prejudge what we’re about to accomplish.
