Reagan's legacy is a complex topic, and unfortunately I felt that Way Out There in the Blue didn't do it justice. FitzGerald used Strategic Missile Defense to approach Reagan's time in office, but SDI never amounted to much. At best, it was just a poker chip bounced around between the Department of Defense, State, the National Security Council, and arms treaty negotiators, as various factions within the American government tried to advance any kind of coherent Soviet policy. Reagan and his administration do not come off looking well in this account. The man himself is profoundly disinterested in both policy and personnel, the movie star who sees his job as selling the American public on whatever his advisers have decided. Reagan was an idealist in the worst sense of the word, someone who dreamed of a world without nuclear weapons and of an American triumph, but without the fortitude to work out the messy details of his technologically impossible visions. Perhaps the most damning flaw is that despite the billions of dollars poured into SDI and new strategic weapons during the 80s, the Soviets never bit at the arms race, keeping their expenditures essentially flat without changing the classic Mutually Assured Destruction balance. According to FitzGerald, the USSR fell because of internal flaws and Gorbachev's overly ambitious reforms, not anything Reagan did. If that's the case, why should we even care about Reagan's foreign policy? And finally, despite the billions of dollars invested in basic research, science and scientists barely appear in this work, aside from a few pages with Edward Teller. How can you write the history of a scientifically dependent weapons system without the science?

There's probably an interesting (and much more theoretically ambitious) book about the imaginaries of strategic missile defense out there, but it isn't this book.