Reagan Backs ‘Star Wars’ Despite Study Criticizing It

The White House said today President Reagan still stands by his “Star Wars” anti-missile program despite a congressional study that says its electronic brains would be so large and complex that there is a “significant probability” they would fail.

White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said Reagan has not been briefed on the study.

Nevertheless, Fitzwater said: “Suffice to say the President still believes in the Strategic Defense Initiative program. He believes in its potential and certainly has no plans to change our policy or our priority status for SDI.”

The report Tuesday by the congressional Office of Technology Assessment is the latest in a series of scientific studies to criticize Reagan’s “Star Wars,” as the 5-year-old program is informally known.

Computer Systems Criticized

The study’s harshest criticism was reserved for the computer systems that would be needed for “battle management,” the Pentagon term for tracking and targeting Soviet missiles.

“In OTA’s judgment, there would be a significant probability (i.e., one large enough to take seriously) that the first (and presumably only) time the (ballistic missile defense) system were used in a real war, it would suffer a catastrophic failure,” the report said.

It added that there is no effective way to test such a system and “no adequate models for the development, production, test and maintenance of software for full-scale BMD systems exist.”

The Pentagon-based Strategic Defense Initiative Organization issued a statement saying that the conclusions reflect “opinion rather than real analysis and are based primarily on extrapolation from past experience as opposed to the potential of the newer technologies becoming available in SDI research and in the computer industry.”

Assertion Challenged

The statement also said, “The OTA assertion that strategic defense software cannot be tested sufficiently for operational confidence, short of war, is already at variance with several decades of developing strategic warning and today’s offensive missile deterrent systems.”

Reagan said he wanted his program to have a goal of making nuclear weapons obsolete, but the Pentagon and SDI backers have pushed for deployment in the mid-1990s of a “phase one” “Star Wars” shield that would have a much more limited goal.

Pentagon officials last year estimated that it would cost $75 billion to $150 billion to build a phase one system comprised of ground-based rockets and space-based “garages” full of missiles which could be fired at attacking Soviet missiles.

The phase one proposals call for basically using existing technology rather than the exotic, futuristic technologies such as lasers and beam weapons that were a focus of early SDI research.