I was thinking about the 1980s recently. I lived thru them, and it was pretty nice. A whole lot of people had a whole lot of good times back then, including me. The music was “bouncier”, if you will (who can ever forget Duran Duran?). The economy seemed to be getting better (after the “stagflation” of the late 70s) and gasoline prices were coming down. New stores were opening and new products were hitting the shelves. IBM and some company named Apple started selling computers that you could buy and use right in your own home. Things seemed to be changing for the better. And despite all the “evil empire” rumblings from the White House regarding our archenemy, the Soviet Union, there didn’t seem to be any wars that the average American family had to worry about.

Instead, there was “Star Wars”, President Reagan’s ultimate “feel good” project. No longer would we have to worry about a rain of fire from Soviet missiles. Technology was ready to seal us off from the lingering threat of nuclear destruction, a leftover nightmare from the 1950s. All that was needed to make that happen was some good old-fashioned American know-how and a positive attitude. Ron Reagan was a master at positive attitude. Ron promised us that by the early 1990s there would be lasers in space and on airplanes and submarines and at ground sites, everywhere you look, giving us absolute protection against the forces of evil.

Looking back now, it’s hard to believe how many people swallowed this. Or sadder still, how many people weren’t deceived, but were powerless to stop the delusion of our exaulted leader. I just did some perfunctory research, and it appears that Mr. Reagan actually believed that the technology was there to build a foolproof shield against nuclear missiles. In a series of letters he wrote to his best friend (Laurence Beilenson, a former attorney for the Screen Actors Guild), Reagan said that he wasn’t trying to fake out the Soviets and get them to spend themselves into bankruptcy. (Supposedly the Soviet leader of the time, Mikhal Gorbachev, knew that we couldn’t really do it anyway). He honestly thought it would work.

President Reagan probably got the “Star Wars” idea from some Popular Science articles (or from Flash Gordon movie scripts). In 1983 he took it to his generals and they said “sure, we can do it, just give us lots of money”. Reagan never stopped to think that no military bigwig would tell him the truth in that situation. They all wanted to keep their jobs, and they also liked the idea of getting lots of money. And they wouldn’t be around long enough to take the blame if nothing much came of it (which is what happened), because generals and admirals only serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff for a few years.

Between 1983 and 1989, the Strategic Defense Initiative spent nearly $50 billion, only to find out what a lot of smart people knew from the start: that our electronics and optics and computers and communications and rockets and other stuff weren’t nearly ready to protect the northern half of the planet from missile attack. The proverbial haystacks were (and still are) way too big, and the needles are still way too small.

Amazing: fifty billion dollars pretty much vaporized. What if America had instead invested that money into energy independence technology (as Jimmy Carter was doing when he was president, and which Ronald Reagan stopped as soon as he entered office)? Would we now have 60 MPG cars and be pretty much independent from Middle Eastern oil? Would Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups have never gotten off the ground due to lack of funding (remember that a part of every dollar that you spend for gasoline goes to support terrorism, probably thru the Royal Saudi family and their “charitable donations”)?

OK, maybe I’m going too far here, just as President Reagan was pushing technology beyond its capacity with his dreams. But we would at least be moving in the right direction by now. Star Wars was a defense against the enemy of the past; perhaps the Soviet Union collapsed a bit quicker because of their response to stepped-up American military spending during the Reagan years. But it was the Abrams tanks and Pershing missiles and aircraft carriers that worried them, not some crazy scheme about exploding X-ray laser satellites. Had we started pushing energy conservation and alternative sources back then, we would have better defenses against terrorism today — in 1985, terrorism was the enemy of the future (and now the present).

The problem is this: President Bush the Second is still dreaming the Ronald Reagan dream. He’s still trying to get more oil from the Middle East (isn’t that what the Iraq war is really all about?). And he’s still trying to shoot down missiles that North Korea and Iran may or may not ever have (when it’s airplane hijackers and subway bombers that immediately threaten us). And his “limited missile defense” still doesn’t work! When are we going to wake up from the Reagan dream (pleasant though it was)? When will we see what Jimmy Carter — and now semi-famous NY Times columnist Tom Friedman — knew and still know: that we have to put all our technology cards on energy independence if America is going to have a future.