National Missile Defense - A CS91 Final Project by Joshua Galun, Joshua Shakin, and Tan Mau Wu Next month, June 2000, President Clinton will decide whether to deploy a National Missile Defense (NMD) system. This system, a scaled-down successor to President Reagan's Strategic Defensive Initiative, is designed to protect the United States against a handful of nuclear missiles. There is a great deal of domestic pressure on President Clinton to deploy the system. Should he not, it could easily become a campaign issue used against Al Gore - "You were part of an Administration that did not defend the United States against nuclear attack," Bush could claim. Yet at the same time, there is international pressure for the United States to hold off on NMD, and, perhaps more importantly, prominent scientists have expressed doubts about whether the technology exists to make NMD a reality. This web site examines the political and technological issues surrounding NMD, and tries to come to a conclusion about the viability and ethics of the proposed system.