Time to Alter a Vision as ‘Star Wars’ Fades Out : SDI Has Played Well as Strategic Snake Oil; Now Reagan Can Use It as Bargaining Chip

Five years after President Reagan proclaimed the goal of making nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete,” his Strategic Defense Initiative is on its last legs. A full-blown “Star Wars” program is the victim of economics, progress in East-West relations--and Reagan’s own vision.

It is a mark of the powers of presidential persuasion that Star Wars was taken so seriously for so long. Reagan’s premise was that the United States could build a space shield that would stop all nuclear weapons, no matter how hard the Soviets tried to overcome it. This never made sense. Hiroshima-size weapons can now be produced in tiny packages; a determined aggressor would surely have the ingenuity to slip a few of them past any manner of defenses and cause horrendous carnage.

There was a case for deploying exotic space weapons to reduce, but not to prevent, American casualties in the event of a nuclear war. But that case rested on abstruse arguments about the role of uncertainty in the Soviet Union’s calculations about the outcome of nuclear conflict. These arguments, themselves susceptible to criticism, were too complex to gain public understanding and support for a less-than-perfect space shield.

By promising so much, the President thus undercut the argument for doing less. Most important is the potential value of defending U.S. nuclear retaliatory forces against a Soviet missile attack. U.S. land-based missiles, housed in underground silos, are indeed vulnerable. Eventually space-based technologies could protect enough of them to prevent the Soviets from eliminating this part of the U.S. retaliatory arsenal.

Accomplishing this purpose, however, does not require all the paraphernalia associated with the Strategic Defense Initiative. It can be done with ground-based defenses, the offshoots of programs that the United States pursued in the 1960s and then abandoned after signing the anti-ballistic-missile treaty with the Soviets in 1972. Even so, opponents of ABM defenses argue that there are better and cheaper means of protecting land-based missiles than SDI. These could include making U.S. missiles mobile, and thus harder for Soviet attackers to find and destroy.

Economics also caught up with SDI. When the rising curve of this country’s defense spending reached its peak and turned downward, something had to give. A major program for deploying Star Wars began to attract opponents within the Pentagon. As the Defense Department’s largest single research project and potentially the record-holder in deployment costs, SDI has threatened to starve the military services in other areas. Thus Congress has reduced research funds with little outcry from military officers who believe, correctly, that other projects are more critical to U.S. national security.

Star Wars is also beset by developments in U.S.-Soviet relations. As Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev press forward to reduce nuclear weapons, it becomes more difficult to gain political support for new strategic projects--especially one whose rationale is so controversial. This flies in the face of the logic of nuclear deterrence, which holds that reducing the number of weapons increases the need to ensure the survival of those that are left. But logic cannot prevail against the political appeal of a new era of detente. For the same reason, there is not likely to be much impetus to deploy a limited defensive system against a few Soviet missiles launched by accident.

It is not clear whether Reagan understands that his original Star Wars vision is dead. If not, he may continue to resist compromise on key issues in U.S.-Soviet bargaining, like whether tests in space should be permitted and whether the ABM treaty should be interpreted as limiting such tests. In so doing, he would risk losing his historic chance to conclude a strategic arms-reduction treaty, assuming that other issues can be resolved.

It is difficult to know what is in the minds of the Soviets. Yet they are at the bargaining table, and they have accepted Reagan’s basic goals for cutting offensive weapons. The Strategic Defense Initiative probably played some role in leading Gorbachev in this direction. He, too, may have given more credence to Reagan’s SDI promises than could be fulfilled. The President can be credited as a superb salesman of strategic snake oil. But as the Pentagon itself cuts back the goals for defending against ballistic missiles, it is hard to believe that Reagan can continue the same pitch and gain further Soviet concessions.

The time has thus come to play the SDI “bargaining chip.” Then U.S. debate about the wisdom of building defenses for land-based missiles, or to protect against a few missiles launched by accident, can be brought back to Earth where it belongs.