BILL HEMMER, CNN ANCHOR: A look back at President Reagan's Star Wars missile defense program, in today's "CNN 20" segment. Have a look and a listen here.</s>BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, MARCH 23, 1983) RONALD REAGAN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Let me share with you a vision of the future which offers hope. It is that we embark on a program to counter the awesome Soviet missile threat with measures that are defensive.</s>CHARLES BIERBAUER, CNN WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT: What President Reagan and White House officials called it the Strategic Defense Initiative, we called it "Star Wars." This wasn't too terribly long after the first "Star Wars" movies came out. And it was kind of a science fiction approach to defending the country, space-based missile systems. lasers, a thing called the rail gun, which I'm not sure -- we never figured out quite what it was. It was nonconventional, in terms of what you would think of as the kind of defense that the country would have. And so it got tagged with this notion that it was Star Wars-like. And the Reagan administration didn't particularly like that because it seemed to be mocking it, it seemed to be putting it in the realm of science fiction. And then people said: Do we need a space-based missile defense? The ideas that these weapons in space could knock down an incoming missile that might be launch by the Soviet Union. It's still pretty in the realm of science fiction because it has not come to pass, partly because it had an enormous price tag, partly because it was never proven as effective technology, but more importantly, because the Cold War ended.
CNN 20: Pres. Reagan Proposes Star Wars