Activism
Despite his involvement with space programs and defense, he emerged as an early public critic of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, also aka "Star Wars") during the Ronald Reagan administration. On The MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour, he called it "the ultimate military lunacy, easily overwhelmed and vulnerable". Bowman founded the Institute for Space and Security Studies, and its publication Space & Security News (1983) (ISSN 1071-2569), and authored two books on the subject of SDI. He is also a critic of an outgrowth of the SDI program, the Bush administration's proposed National Missile Defense.
For several years he has been active with Veterans for Peace and Vietnam Veterans Against the War as a speaker. He had also been a member of the Peace Commission of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington.
In 1998, Project Censored cited Bowman's article "Our Continuing War Against Iraq," in the May 1998 issue of Space and Security News as one of the few (along with Bill Blum of the San Francisco Bay Guardian and Dennis Bernstein) covering what they deemed the fifth most censored story, "U.S. Weapons of Mass Destruction Linked to the Deaths of Half a Million Children." The WMDs referred to are the biological samples sent to Iraq from the United States up to 1989, and use of depleted uranium during the Gulf War.
In a radio interview on April 12, 2007, Bowman said:
"Technological feasibility of a defensive shield is entirely irrelevant, because Star Wars has nothing to do with defense. It is an attempt to deploy offensive weapons disguised as defense. In 1982, in his secret defense guidance document, Ronald Reagan ordered the Department of Defense to develop Star Wars weapons, and he assigned them two missions. One: Destroy opposing satellites and seize control of space. Two: Destroy targets on the surface of the earth from space without warning. There wasn't a word in there about shooting down ballistic missiles. That was a smokescreen for the American people, because they knew that the American people would never approve weapons in space for offensive purposes.
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