I think the difficult part of pulling the bluff off was SDI had to look simultaneously very good against current systems but not perfect and potentially highly

I think the difficult part of pulling the bluff off was SDI had to look simultaneously very good against current systems but not perfect and potentially highly vulnerable to future systems. Schelling established, at length, that perfect defence will be interpreted by an adversary as the inevitable first stage in making the first strike, and while him and Kissinger had their disagreements about real politics when it came to the core theory I believe they were aligned. Schelling’s books get widely misinterpreted but are very readable, and anyone wanting more should go straight to the source. Ignore what other people said he said.