Strategic Defense Initiative - Fiction and Popular Culture

Fiction and Popular Culture

Because of public awareness of the program and its controversial nature, SDI has been the subject of many fictional and pop culture references. This is not intended to be a complete list of those references.

• In 1986, the British breakdance group The Willesden Dodgers released the track Not This President which was referring to President Reagan and the Strategic Defence Initiative.
• The Japanese Heavy Metal band Loudness's song "S.D.I." is a criticism of the idea of this initiative inspiring nuclear war.
• Dale Brown's novel Silver Tower details the adventures on and around a space station that employs an anti-ICBM laser system called Skybolt against a Soviet invasion of Iran; it would reappear in Brown's Patrick McLanahan saga starting with the 2007 novel Strike Force.
• Tom Clancy's novel The Cardinal of the Kremlin is based in part on a race between the USA and USSR to complete laser-based SDI systems.
• Homer Hickam Jr's novel Back to the Moon used leftover SDI weapons, including the Homing Overlay Experiment, in an attempt to kill the crew of shuttle Columbia.
• Whitley Strieber's novel Warday details how the Soviet Union launches a preemptive, limited nuclear attack on the United States while it was deploying the Strategic Defense Initiative (called "Spiderweb" in the novel) out of fears that the SDI would make the USA potentially invulnerable to Soviet missile attacks.
• In the Civilization series, there are several references to ICBM defense systems similar to SDI.
• The comedy movie Real Genius follows college physics prodigies who are unknowingly induced to develop a space-based laser weapon system for the Air Force.
• In RoboCop, a brief satirical news story mentions how a Strategic Defense platform codenamed Peace, malfunctioned in orbit, destroying a swathe of Southern California in the process.
• Spies Like Us follows two duped 'spies' who are told to launch a single Soviet missile towards the USA as part of a black operation to demonstrate and justify the expense of SDI.
• In the 1993 Larry Bond novel Cauldron the GPALS system is depicted as having been deployed with the Brilliant Pebbles weapons included. They are used to destroy all French and German military satellites covering an invasion of Poland in the then-future of 1998.
• In the 2010 T.V. series Nikita, a rogue government black ops program called Division tries to blackmail the US president using an abandoned SDI laser satellite as ground attack weapon in season two.