‘Star Wars’ ‘Peaceful,’ Reagan Says : Feels Giving Up Plan Would Be Like British Appeasement of Hitler

President Reagan, in North Dakota to help out GOP Sen. Mark Andrews, today defended his “Star Wars” proposal as a “purely peaceful technology” and compared it to the World War II radar used to beat back the Nazis.

At a political rally for Andrews, Reagan said that trading his Strategic Defense Initiative for arms reductions at the Iceland summit would have been the equivalent of Britain’s Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler at Munich before World War II.

Recalling British research at the time to develop radar, Reagan said that without that new technology “it’s possible that the Royal Air Force wouldn’t have been able to beat back the Nazi air assault on England.”

‘A Tragic Blunder’

“I couldn’t help but think,” Reagan continued, “that giving up SDI would have been like Chamberlain giving up radar, as well as Czechoslovakia, at Munich--a tragic blunder that might have spelled the end to freedom in Europe.”

The decision to permit Hitler to dismember and occupy Czechoslovakia in the hope that it would appease his expansionist appetite is often cited as a catastrophic miscalculation that emboldened the Nazi dictator and led to the invasion of Poland and the start of World War II.

Reagan today also defended his free-market agriculture policies in the Upper Midwest, where farmers have suffered hard times. Andrews has been hurt by the ailing farm economy and faces a strong challenge Nov. 4 from the state tax commissioner, Kent Conrad.

Reagan met briefly with representatives of state agricultural interests and promised them that “government will stand by you during these hard times.”

Defends ’85 Farm Bill

But he added, “The last thing farmers need is to return to the party that gave them grain embargoes, outrageous inflation and 21.5% interest rates.”

Defending the compromise farm bill he signed last year paring subsidies for many agricultural products, Reagan acknowledged: “There are things in the farm bill that Mark (Andrews) doesn’t like. And there are things in it I don’t like.

“But we both agree government programs ought to be better targeted to the family farmers who need it most. Right now, some subsidies operate to make rich farmers richer, and we’re opposed to that.”

Recent polls have shown the race to be a tossup.