[andrewtbham]

Regarding the cold war and military spending... Everyone in the 80s thought Reagan was nuts because he wanted to build "Star Wars" a system that would shoot down all the Soviet Nukes. So the Soviets wasted money trying to compete with it. So at least in some cases, it wasn't about us spending more on the military... it was about tricking them into spending more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative

[nradov]

Was it really a trick? By all accounts, President Reagan was sincerely horrified by the threat of a nuclear war and really did intend to build a working defensive system. But he was clueless about the difficulty of actually building such a system, and then the military industrial complex piled onto the gravy train to get lucrative R&D projects.