Perhaps Donald Trump had Ronald Reagan’s strategic defense initiative (SDI) in mind when he pushed through a new military branch dubbed Space Force in his first term. But there can be little doubt that candidate Trump had even bigger plans for his second. Citing advances in technology from the Reagan era, he pledged to develop and deploy what liberal critics once derided as Star Wars. In fact, the Gipper felt the need to keep his vision for a space-based defense under wraps from a ‘deep state’ committed to killing it. Sound familiar? Indeed, Reagan sprung it on a surprised Washington DC establishment in March 1983 when he asked, “What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?” Over 30 years ago Jason Lewis wrote about this strategic plan to render nuclear weapons obsolete, to which Reagan was truly dedicated. It was a bipolar world back then with a true communist menace, but nearly every postwar President feared a nuclear miscalculation. Europe’s continued insistence on poking a tired Russian bear has only raised the stakes. The more things change the more they stay the same. Reagan was never comfortable with the doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD) in an age of nuclear proliferation. Of course, as terror groups acquire ballistic missile capabilities, including potential hypersonic cruise missiles, it isn’t just nukes we need to worry about—100 pounds of anthrax can kill a quarter of a million people. We have arrived at the next significant milestone in the evolution of U.S. missile defense policy, yet the type of comprehensive space-based strategic defense that Reagan, and now Trump, have embraced is still strewn with political roadblocks—including military rivalries, bureaucratic inertia and techno