Introduction

Ronald Reagan's speech on 23 March 1983 announcing the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) stands, arguably, as the archetypal manifestation of instrumental thinking in a political address. Reagan followed his commentary on the moral and political inadequacy of reliance on nuclear weapons – ‘Wouldn't it be better to save lives than avenge them?’ – with an exhortation to ‘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’. American scientists had been the first to produce the means of mass destruction; why shouldn't they be able to produce protection against these means? ‘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.’ Moreover, Reagan argued, the American industrial base was already producing technology that had ‘attained a level of sophistication where it's reasonable for us to begin this effort’. The promise of a technological solution was deemed to be worth ‘every investment necessary to free the world from the threat of nuclear war’.

The reason why Reagan's appeal can be viewed as particularly instrumentalist is its emphasis on the (re)assertion of popular control over technology, and, hence, the notion of technology as instrument of politics.