The nerve center of the Star Wars lobby is Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy (CSP), a think tank and advocacy organization that puts out roughly 200 press releases per year (under the more authoritative name of "national security decision briefs") touting missile defenses, increases in the military budget, and other stock right-wing themes. Since its inception in 1988, Gaffney’s group has received over $2 million in corporate donations, mostly from companies like Lockheed Martin and Boeing, which are major Star Wars contractors. Gaffney’s CSP also has no fewer than five Lockheed Martin executives on its board, not to mention vintage Star Warriors such as weapons physicist Edward Teller and his protégé, George Keyworth, who served as Ronald Reagan’s science advisor when the Star Wars scheme was first being hatched. The Center for Security Policy also has close links to other conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and Empower America, both of which have representatives on the CSP board. During the fall of 1998, the Star Wars lobby made a concerted effort to win over one more senator to Sen. Thad Cochran’s Defend America Act, which would require deployment of a National Missile Defense system. Toward that end, Empower America ran misleading radio ads in the state of Nevada in an effort to convince residents that the reluctance of their two Democratic senators, Harry Reid and Richard Bryan, to vote for a largely useless and massively expensive missile defense system meant that they were against "defending our families" from nuclear attack. In the short term, these prodigious efforts on the part of the Star Wars lobby were in vain. Due in part to a public backlash against the tactics used by special prosecutor Kenneth Starr and the Republican congressional leadership in the Lewinsky scandal, the Republicans failed to pick up a seat in the Senate in the 1998 elections, and Democratic incumbents like Harry Reid of Nevada and Barbara Boxer of California, who had been specifically criticized for opposing Star Wars, were reelected. Despite these apparent setbacks in the 1998 elections, the Star Wars lobby didn’t give up; by the spring of 1999, both the Senate and the House had been persuaded to pass legislation modeled on the Cochran bill which stated that it is the policy of the United States government to deploy a National Missile Defense as soon as it is "technologically feasible." While arms control advocates like Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) tried to soften the blow by sponsoring amendments calling for the United States to continue to pursue nuclear weapons reductions with Russia, the passage of the two Star Wars resolutions were clearly a major propaganda victory for conservative missile defense boosters and their corporate sponsors.²⁷