Lyndon LaRouche’s Proposal to Eliminate the Threat of Nuclear War!

On March 23, one day before President Biden left for emergency discussions on war with NATO and EU leaders, followed by a trip to Poland, U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told the press that while the United States has “not changed our nuclear posture to date,” President Biden “will be consulting with Allies and partners on that potential contingency”.

How ironic that Jake Sullivan announced that, in sum, nuclear war is no longer unthinkable, on the same date that 39 years ago (March 23, 1983), U.S. President Ronald Reagan had shocked the world by announcing his commitment to develop new anti-ballistic missile technologies for defense purposes, in a program later to be called the “Strategic Defense Initiative” (SDI). This came at a time of extreme tension when both the United States and the Soviet Union were deploying nuclear weapons in close proximity to each other in Europe.

The shock was even greater when Reagan’s Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger conveyed to Moscow the offer that the U.S. and USSR should develop this new technology together, and deploy the new strategic-ballistic missile defense system jointly, so that neither side gained an advantage over the other, what one might call a “win-win” solution to the threat of nuclear war.

What is less known is that that concept had been developed by Lyndon LaRouche years before and first publicized by him in a July 1977 in a widely distributed mass pamphlet. His political movement then organized support for it from among scientists and intelligence officials in the Reagan administration, who eventually asked LaRouche, in December 1981, to engage in “back channel” discussions on the idea with Soviet officials. (See here for a full report.)

The concept involved the development of defense systems based on “new physical principles”, capable of destroying any nuclear missiles before they could reach their targets, and thus render them obsolete. The design of such systems would require crash research and development programs, including in fusion energy, space, laser and beam particle technologies. In that way, much as with the spill-over effects of the early NASA programs, it would lead to a tremendous science-driven growth in the real economies of all the countries involved, including the Soviet Union.

Ultimately, the Soviet leaders rejected the offer made by President Reagan, and the economic collapse of the USSR accelerated. From the U.S. side, the anti-science, zero-growth lobby sabotaged the SDI, while a vicious campaign to discredit Lyndon LaRouche personally was set in motion by the FBI and other “British empire” forces.

Nonetheless, the scientific, strategic and economic method drafted at the time by LaRouche and subsequently refined, remains fully relevant and viable today, and must be applied in the current crisis. It is the approach at the heart of the Schiller Institute’s campaign today for a new security and development architecture, and will be the focus of the April 9 conference (cf. the lead item above).