March 23—Forty years ago today, President Reagan shocked the world, announcing that the United States would make nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete,” employing advanced scientific principles (lasers, plasma physics, electromagnetic pulses, etc.) to make it an order of magnitude cheaper to kill missiles than to build them. Further, the strategic defense systems would be provided to the Russians—then the communist U.S.S.R. Reagan had adopted the program as designed, laid out, and campaigned for by Lyndon LaRouche.