Out of the Frying Pan

However wrong we think President Reagan has been in pushing his Strategic Defense Initiative--popularly known as “Star Wars”--he was at least trying to find a way to defend the United States against nuclear missiles that might be launched in anger or by accident. It is all the more disturbing, therefore, to hear that technology that is being developed for a defense system can easily be turned on its head to become a horrendous offensive weapon.

Times staff writer Robert Scheer quotes two authoritative sources to this effect. One is an article in a journal of the American Physical Society. The other is a study by R&D; Associates, a Los Angeles-based think tank.

The R&D; study says, in part, that “a laser defense system powerful enough to cope with the ballistic-missile threat can also destroy the enemy’s major cities by fire.” Meanwhile, an article in the journal of the American Physical Society says that laser-set fires might cause “a climate catastrophe similar to nuclear winter.”

If defensive anti-missile technology can be converted to an offensive, fry-the-world device all that easily, this alone is reason enough to kill the Star Wars program. It doesn’t make much sense to launch an enormously expensive anti-missile program if, at the end of the road, the United States and the Soviet Union would merely have traded vulnerability to missiles for vulnerabilty to death rays.

When Reagan and his aides say that they have been looking at the American SDI program purely as a defensive system, we believe them. But what about the Soviets? What would prevent their taking anti-missile technology and adding it to their offensive forces?

Maybe the technology isn’t there. Zapping space objects from Earth or incinerating cities from space would require a lot of power. It is one thing to build power stations on Earth and another to put the same amount of capability into space.

But the questions raised are beyond the ken of the average citizen, who appropriately looks to his government for guidance. What is needed is a searching third-party inquiry into the offensive spinoffs of defensive technologies.

The Reagan Administration is too much committed to its SDI program for anyone to expect an objective study. This means that it’s up to Congress to study very carefully whether the President’s strategic defense program is not heading in directions that will cause more problems than it could ever solve.