Hobby Shop Takes Off
President Reagan’s call for defenses against nuclear missiles is taking strange turns that he surely could not have seen three years ago. He is going to have to move quickly to keep it from getting completely out of hand.
He could not have intended that the Pentagon would be adding another act to what became a “Star Wars” circus last month when it passed off what is actually an anti-aircraft weapon as a milestone toward Reagan’s dream of a shield against nuclear weapons.
A weapon that was tested in the New Mexico desert in late June might someday serve as a fairly good defense against supersonic aircraft if the country could afford enough of them. But hailing it as progress for Star Wars was like promoting a one-story flight of stairs as an important step toward the moon.
Its timing had more to do with the fact that Congress is balking at handing over $5.4 billion more to the Pentagon for Star Wars than with the kind of basic research that is needed just to discover whether the dream is within reach of 20th-Century science.
Over the weekend Reagan once again held out the promise of “a defensive system that can protect us and our allies against all ballistic missiles, nuclear and conventional.”
But the truth is that the billions of dollars spent on Star Wars since Reagan’s 1983 call for defenses to make nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete” have served chiefly to turn up new obstacles to making such a system work. Recent failures of far simpler space systems, including the disasters of the shuttle Challenger and two workhorse launchers used to launch satellites into orbit, only underscore the difficulty.
Yet Times staff writer James Gerstenzang reports from Washington that the program, even with the cuts in Star Wars funding that Congress has in mind, may already have reached a critical mass of defense contractors and star warriors that would blow up in the face of Congress if the latter chopped spending to reasonable levels.
The program already has a constituency of contractors, research laboratories and communities that are accustomed to a flow of $3 billion a year and looking for more. It may have developed the kind of momentum that Congress will have difficulty turning off.
Several hundred physicists have pledged not to work on the system, but as one official working for a defense contractor told The Times, others are attracted to the program: “When you start talking about ray guns and mirrors in space, you’re talking about a wonderful hobby shop.”
A hobby shop for engineers who might otherwise devote their talents to helping the United States stay ahead in the race with other industrial nations toward higher peacetime technology cannot be what Reagan originally had in mind.
Nor can he be faulted for not understanding that what he seemed to promise three years ago probably is impossible. Nor was it clear at the time that even trying to see whether such a system could be made to work might mean wiping out existing arms-control agreements such as the ABM treaty limiting what both the United States and the Soviet Union could do with defenses.
Reagan still can throttle back the hobby shop to reasonable levels of spending, somewhere between $2 billion and $3 billion a year, that would build a base of real research that might some generations into the future diminish the nuclear threat.
That would come naturally if he modified his position that Star Wars is off-limits for arms-control agreements. An agreement with the Soviets on major cuts in offensive weapons that still allows prudent Star Wars research is still in the cards. He must move in that direction before Star Wars takes on a life of its own and turns his dream into a nightmare.
