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Security Council (NSC) meeting revealed in February this year that President Reagan has decided on an early deployment of the SDI system. President Reagan is re- ported by the Washington Post as having told the NSC meeting; “Why don’t we just go ahead on the assumption that this is what we are doing? Don’t ask the Sovi- ets, tell them “the US can move see the price tag and I’m willing to pay.” The leaked minutes have embarrassed European readers who are hoping for greater arms control during the remaining years of the Reagan Administra- . tion. British Prime Minister Mar- garet Thatcher has prided herself on holding Mr Reagan tothe 1972 ABM Treaty. According to the leaked docu- ments, Secretary of State Charles Schultz is the only senior member of the Administration to have opposed making a decision about early deployment of SDI. President Reagan’s special arms control adviser, General Edward Rawny, said in March this year that “dramatic progress in research” into kinetic energy weapons would enable deploy- ment of a \ partial Star Wars de- anna mor fence system by 1994. Defence lawyers were working to create a “broader” interpretation of the 1972 ABM Treaty which eur- rently disallows testing of such systems. REACTORS IN SPACE The US Department of Energy has put forward a proposal costing US$70 million this year for an initial development pro- gramme for placing new mini- nuclear reactors in space. If de- velopments go ahead under the SDI program, the $1 billion re- quired for the project will come from public money. The compact power sources being proposed would enable the continuous delivery of 250 mega- watts for several years in orbit. This is needed for SDI nuclear- driven energy weapons, such as x-ray lasers. The Soviet Union already have at least 40 small Uranium-235 powered reactors in space (Four have crashed to Earth, including the Cosmos sat- ellite which crashed in Canada in of Energy proposal, the prototype would be ready for ground testing by 1990 and for its first flight in 1993. These systems are ex- tremely vulnerable to attack - one critic has said that, if damaged, it would result in the “fastest core meltdown in history”. US Senator Edward Markey (Chairman of the Energy Conser- vation and Power Subcommittee) accused the Department of En- ergy of “seeking to corrupt and militarise peaceful civil re- Parry search”, REaCctoOrR Professor Desmond Ball, head of the Strategic and Defence Centre at the Australian National University, says that the joint American-Australian installation at Nurrungar in South Australia has been used as part of President Reagan’s SDI program, despite claims by the Prime Minister, Mr Hawke. ; Nurrungar is the ground sta- tion for the US Defence Support Program (DSP) early warning satellite which monitors Soviet operation in 1971, according to Professor Ball. o¢. STar Wars Now? Leaked minutes of a National ahead’. I’ll say I’ve revaluated. I 1978 - a failure rate of one in ten). According to the Department Nexus New Times Two STAR WARS OZ missile and satellite launches. More than 6,000 Soviet launches have been recorded at the Nurrun- gar base since the station started