Shooting From the Hip

In his State of the Union message last week President Reagan said that his strategic defense program, commonly called “Star Wars,” “will go forward.” It was not clear which of two versions he was talking about.

If he was talking about the Pentagon’s new plan to launch a jury-rigged system of space platforms and old-fashioned rockets into space as fast as possible, Congress should tell him nothing doing.

But he may have meant the Star Wars research program that he launched three years ago in hopes of making nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete.” In that case Congress should throttle the program back even further than it did last year and turn it into a serious scientific undertaking, complete with review by outside scientists at every crucial step. The present program is science-fiction--with the emphasis on fiction.

Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger announced early this month that the Pentagon did not want to wait for the exotic new weapons, such as nuclear-powered laser beams, that have been promoted as the heart of the Star Wars research program. Some days later the Pentagon also said that it didn’t want to talk about Star Wars anymore--giving notice that even research budgets are now classified, available to Congress but not the public.

There are two reasons for the Pentagon’s wanting to run with a strategic defense program, even if has to use relatively primitive technology. One is that results on the exotic technology are coming far more slowly than its supporters care to admit. The other was spilled by Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III last month: The President’s team wants to push Star Wars to a point where there would be no turning back, to a point where it could no longer “be tampered with by future Administrations.”

There are more and better reasons for Congress to slap the Pentagon down on this one.

One is money. The estimates of the cost of research and testing alone run as high as $100 billion. Proposed spending for defense already is too high to fit in a budget that would start cutting into the massive annual deficits.

The Pentagon’s new plan would violate the 1972 ABM treaty that prohibits tests of missile defenses on land, at sea or in space. The Pentagon has argued in the past that the exotic new weapons that it had in mind for Star Wars were not covered by the treaty because they did not exist when it was signed. But the Pentagon’s new plan clearly is covered by the treaty. The rocket-driven missiles that it would use are as old as the treaty itself.

The Soviets would probably accelerate whatever research programs they now have for space-based defenses if they saw the United States scrambling to get something into space quickly. There would be no more talk about reducing the number of Soviet missiles; the incentive for them would be to build even more in an effort to overwhelm U.S. defenses.

Worse, the Soviets would be free to start expanding their land-based defense system around Moscow to other parts of the country because the ABM treaty and its limits would die with the first tests that the United States conducted in space.

The most compelling reason is that the Pentagon’s new plan would not protect the United States against attack, even though it would push to full throttle the very race to excel in weapons of mass destruction that the President says he was trying to stop when he called for research on defenses. The most kindly estimate of the effectiveness of the system that the Pentagon is proposing is that it would stop 90% of missiles headed for this country. But, according to one estimate, it would take only 2% of the missiles to destroy 150 American cities.

What these arguments against an accelerated plan say to us is that the United States should take Star Wars to the bargaining table in Geneva. What they cry out for is a negotiated agreement to cut nuclear weapons on both sides from thousands to hundreds, with defense serving simply as an added margin of safety, as insurance against an accident.