Others debate Excalibur's role in SDI from the start. Park suggests that Reagan's "kitchen cabinet" was pushing for some sort of action on BMD even before this period. Charles Townes suggested the key impetus to move forward was not Teller, but a presentation by the Joint Chiefs of Staff made only a few weeks before his speech that suggested shifting some development funding to defensive systems. Reagan mentioned this during the speech introducing SDI. Nigel Hey points to Robert McFarlane and the United States National Security Council as a whole. In a 1999 interview with Hey, Teller himself would suggest that he had little to do with the president's decision to announce SDI. He also did not want to talk about the X-ray laser and said he did not even recognize the name "Excalibur".