http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-obamas-chance-to-end-the--fantasy-that-is-star-wars-1015509.html

The world is still pleasurably suffering from Woah-bama whiplash. Did he really win? Are we all awake? And would anybody mind if he starts a few months early? The need for decisions is rapidly piling up – and one of Obama's first choices is whether to bring to an end one of the strangest episodes in American political history.

This is the tale of how a man with Alzheimer's Disease came up with a physically impossible fantasy based on a B-movie he once starred in – and how the US spent $160bn trying to make it come true. These billions succeeded only in making some defence companies very rich, and making Russia point its nukes at Poland and the UK once more. And if Obama doesn't decide to close this long-running farce now, it will make one more contribution to world history: the number of Weapons of Mass Destruction in the world will dramatically increase.

Here's how this story began – and continued into our time. In the early 1980s, President Ronald Reagan was increasingly worried that a nuclear war with the Soviet Union was inevitable, until a long-suppressed memory resurfaced in his mind. In 1940, he had starred in a hokey movie called Murder in the Air. He played a secret agent who had to protect a newly invented super-weapon called the "Intertia Projector", which fired an electrical current at any plane or missile approaching the US, rendering it worthless. In the film, a scientist tells Reagan that this weapon "makes the US invincible in war, and promises to become the greatest force for world peace ever discovered".

Why, Reagan wondered, couldn't he have a real Intertia Projector? Let's create a machine that would detect any incoming nuke as it approached the US and zap it into nothing! The Cold War stand-off would be over! Reagan was losing the ability to distinguish between reality and films: he repeatedly claimed he had been at the liberation of Auschwitz, when he had recreated it in Hollywood. After the Second World War, there had been a few studies trying to invent such a machine – but they all concluded it was "impossible." Nonetheless, Reagan decided in 1983 to call on America's scientists to make it happen.