On March 23, 1983, President Ronald Reagan gave a televised address on national security that surprised everyone as he challenged “the scientific community who gave us nuclear weapons to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.” His brief words led to the creation of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) and initiated my involvement in a giant program that, although it did not lead to an effective missile defense, did effectively flummox the Soviet Union.

Now we face a global health, economic, political and social threat that could possibly be as risky for all of us as the strategic missile threat we faced in the 1980s. I think we need to approach this real threat from a systems engineering approach, starting with a presidential call for action not just to the bioscience community, but also to the nation’s engineering community.

What I am suggesting is a multilayer defense involving detection and response similar to the concepts we created in the 1983 Fletcher Study. I described this study in my book “Death Rays and Delusions” and the basic approach was an information-based layered system of systems. The needed technology did not exist at that time and is still not available, so the notion of applying this methodology to a very dangerous, contagious and asymptomatic virus may seem a bit unrealistic The biggest deficiencies at that time were the need for space deployed high sensitivity and high specificity sensors, directed energy and kinetic interceptors and the command and control for the entire system.

I may be overly optimistic, but I am suggesting that the COVID Defense Initiative can provide an extremely useful approach. The virus defense technology needed for this system is no more available today than the technology we needed 35 years ago for the SDI, but now is the time for the national commitment and investment to make it real.

I envision a future system beginning with a readily available real time virus detection system. The  reliable sensors would be coupled through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention National Syndromic Surveillance Program to other symptomatic measurements and would provide the means to identify the threat and track it using millions of other simultaneous data sources.

Facility design would be required to prevent the infected person from entering an otherwise virus free location. A next step would be an immediate antiviral treatment  that might be provided using an inhaler. If the detection, reporting and treatment are included in a widely available system of systems, we could achieve a highly effective defense system that could be coupled with a vaccine to reduce the probability of infection. This multilayer approach would reduce the probability of spreading of the disease. As in our multilayer SDI system concept, there would still be a threat, but the probability of infection would become acceptably small .