Few presidential initiatives have attracted more public ridicule from scientists and
engineers than ‘Star Wars’, Ronald Reagan’s 1983
proposal to build a missile defense system that would render the Soviet nuclear
arsenal ‘impotent and obsolete’. Scientists found multiple ways
of critiquing what Reagan’s vision became: not a working weapons system,
but a dramatically escalated research and development program known as the Strategic
Defense Initiative (SDI), which stalled arms-control negotiations near the end of
the Cold War. This paper examines how scientists crossed discursive boundaries
between science and politics as they staged a social movement against SDI: a
nationwide boycott of Star Wars research funds. It argues that scientists made
discursive choices that furthered their immediate challenge to practices of
military-academic research, while still shaping emergent identities in line with
existing institutions. Significantly, this account cannot be simply incorporated
into existing traditions of research in lay-expert communication. Whereas these
traditions suggest that communicative practices either enable or
constrain actors, this account shows they simultaneously did both. It advances the
notion of ‘discursive choices’ as a concept that may help
mediate between structure and agency in studies of public communication with
technical experts. This account suggests that an examination of discursive choices
may contribute to understanding how expertise is maintained and reconfigured within
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