President Demands That Congress Keep ‘Star Wars’ Alive

President Reagan demanded today that Congress keep his “Star Wars” missile defense system alive, arguing that cutting the high-tech program because of domestic budget pressures would be “irresponsible in the extreme.”

Reagan, kicking off an Administration campaign keyed to the program’s fifth anniversary, charged that congressional cuts in his Strategic Defense Initiative have “set the program back one to two years.”

Even though Reagan has reached the point in his presidency that he has sent his last budget to Congress, he pledged in an address to the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis to see the program continued.

And he lauded the technological advances that have been made, asserting that the program has “progressed more rapidly” than was at first thought possible.

‘We Will Deploy It’

“We will continue to research SDI, to develop and test it, and as it becomes ready, we will deploy it,” Reagan vowed.

The President restated his belief that without the space-based missile defense, the United States will be left defenseless in the face of an advanced Soviet space-weapons program.

“A recent report by the Department of Defense called ‘The Soviet Space Challenge’ warns that the Soviet space program points in one disturbing direction . . . the methodical pursuit of a war-fighting capability in space,” Reagan charged.

Because Congress has made cuts for the last four years in Administration SDI requests, “We would be dangerously under-prepared,” Reagan asserted.

“There’s been a tendency by some in Congress to discuss SDI as if its funding could be determined purely by domestic considerations, unconnected to what the Soviets are doing,” Reagan said. “That is, to put it plainly, irresponsible in the extreme.”

Sees U.S. “Defenseless’

He argued that “some in the U.S. Congress” have denied additional funds “because they say SDI won’t work. Well, it won’t if we don’t develop it and test it.

“Congress should realize that it is no longer a question of whether there will be a SDI program or not. The only question will be whether the Soviets are the only ones who have strategic defenses while the United States remains entirely defenseless.”

The pro-SDI campaign comes as Congress has placed constraints on SDI testing and expenditures and as Soviet arms control negotiators in Geneva try to crimp the U.S. effort amid negotiations on a U.S.-Soviet treaty to slash strategic nuclear weapon arsenals in half.