re: #510 Dark_Falcon

But the Soviet Union ended up thinking we might well be able to pull it off (Putin still does think that) and the resultant fear helped drive Gorbachev to the negotiation table.

Gorbachev asked his science adviser if SDI could work. His adviser said no, they could easily build countermeasures and overwhelm it with numbers. This was correct. Sadly, the USSR had a better grasp on the science of it than us.

However, it was still a useful political weapon because ordinary people didn’t really understand it wasn’t possible, so it did put pressure on Gorbachev. And maybe Gorbachev didn’t trust Soviet scientists, because Soviet science had a band tendency to tell the leadership what they though the leadership wanted to know.