Strategic Defense Initiative: full transcription

Let us turn to the very strengths in technology that spawned our great industrial base and that have given us the quality of life we enjoy today. What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?

I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.

A space-based front line of satellite defenses that could destroy Soviet missiles at the early-launch stage, a space-based second line to destroy individual warheads released by Soviet missiles that got through the front line, and a ground-based third line to destroy any warheads in their terminal phase that avoided the other defensive lines.