Science & Tech Quote by Christopher Hitchens

Hitchens is doing what he did best: taking a politician's self-mythology and pressing on it until it squeals. The line turns on the surreal sweetness of Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative origin story - that a massively expensive, technically dubious shield was conceived not as leverage, but as a gift to the Kremlin. Hitchens repeats it with a straight face because he knows the sentence is already a punchline. The comedy is in the moral inversion: the hardline Cold Warrior recast as a benevolent technologist, eager to hand nuclear-proofing to the very "tyrants" his rhetoric supposedly existed to deter.

The intent is not just to mock Reagan's naivete (or performative innocence), but to expose the way American power likes to launder itself through sentimental narratives. "Only in order" is doing heavy work: it collapses a mess of strategic calculation, domestic politics, defense-industry appetite, and public fear into an almost childlike altruism. Hitchens' subtext is that this kind of explanation isn't an argument; it's a fable meant to soothe a liberal conscience and disarm criticism. If the plan is a peace offering, then opposition becomes churlish - who could be against sharing?

Context matters: SDI floated in the late Cold War as both technological fantasy and bargaining chip, and Reagan did sometimes describe it in near-religious terms, a way to make nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete". Hitchens hears in that language the familiar American habit of confusing virtue with virtue-signaling: the grand gesture that pretends geopolitics is a misunderstanding solvable by generosity, while quietly keeping every advantage on your side of the table.