Keeping the Technological Edge: The Space Arms Race and Anglo-American Relations in the 1980s

Abstract

ABSTRACT In March 1983, President Ronald Reagan established the Strategic Defence Initiative [SDI], a research effort to develop the technologies for land- and space-based missile defence. This programme quickly unleashed anxieties about an arms race in space. Superpower military space activities were of significant concern to Britain because they had direct bearing on two key areas of its national security: space-based intelligence collection and the credibility of its nuclear deterrent. This analysis argues that the uses of space for military and intelligence purposes was an essential, though often invisible, aspect of the Anglo-American relationship during the Cold War. Despite the opposition of her senior advisors to SDI, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher maintained that the programme was necessary to stay ahead of the Soviet Union in an intensifying high-technology competition. Rather than opposing the expanded militarisation of space, she believed it required careful management to further British national security interests.