‘Star Wars’ and the Summit

In recent memory, valleys of tension between the superpowers and peaks of outrage made even one summit meeting between President Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev seem out of the question.

On Sunday Reagan will go to Moscow for their fourth meeting. If all goes well, he will deliver notice of the U.S. Senate ratification of a treaty to banish all medium-range nuclear missiles from Europe, notice of a done deal. It is one more step in the new superpower relationship that has commentators rummaging for a better word than detente and asking whether the Cold War is over.

Gorbachev, with the vigor of relative youth, has been the prime mover in the change, partly because it helps him with a long list of reforms of Soviet communism without which his country might well subside to the status of a Third World nation. But Reagan, who a few short years ago consigned Gorbachev’s “evil empire” to the ash heap of history, has been a willing partner, at times an instigator, especially when there was an off-chance to get rid of some nuclear weapons.

All of which sets the stage for tragedy in the classic sense. Having brought the new relationship this far, Reagan may leave office without further progress because of a barrier that he built and refuses to tear down.

The barrier is “Star Wars,” a $4 billion-a-year research program that has produced mostly press releases in the five years during which its people have been trying to design a shield to protect the United States from nuclear weapons.

Despite repeated warnings from physicists, former defense secretaries, systems analysts and others that Star Wars cannot be made to work in this century, or perhaps in any other, the President clings to the dream of invulnerability that the Strategic Defense Initiative stands for. That such a shield might itself be a dangerous thing because it might trigger a violent Soviet reaction to the raw vulnerability that it would feel seems never to be discussed in the White House.

Without a negotiated agreement on the pace and direction of work on missile defenses in both countries, significant cuts in intercontinental missiles are unlikely. The Soviets will not dismantle missiles that they believe they might need to penetrate an American defense. The tragedy lies in the fact that the Soviets might exchange deep cuts for an agreement on defense systems of the future. But if the bargain is not sealed now, it cannot be sealed at all. Congress is throttling back on the Star Wars program, and rightly so. Technical difficulties plague the dream of the nuclear shield. There may be nothing with which to bargain for generations to come, if ever.

For the President, the tragedy will be more personal than global. The superpowers are involved in shifting patterns of wealth and power, changes that are already in motion and not likely to be stopped. Reagan has shared responsibility for bringing the change this far. The tragedy would be in failing to follow through by giving the movement away from nuclear war one last nudge before he leaves office.