The Fading ‘Star Wars’ Dream

“Star Wars” has been fading for a long time, even the pale, faded substitutes for President Reagan’s vision of a shield that would make nuclear missiles bounce back into space. Its repeated failures were mostly technical. Bits and pieces could pass tests in laboratories, but the task of stringing them together into a system and making them work in space was so formidable that practicing physicists outside the program hoot at claims of progress.

Now “Star Wars” will fade politically, thanks in part to Vice President Dan Quayle’s description of the Reagan dream of a system that would make nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete” as “political jargon.” Jargon it was, but it also expressed so completely the most fervent wish of millions of Americans that Congress did not dare shut the program down or even cut its funding enough to force the Air Force to stick to useful basic science.

What Quayle did during a meeting with The Times Washington Bureau Wednesday was focus attention on something Washington has long acknowledged but never discussed in detail. The Pentagon’s goals for “Star Wars” are far more modest than protecting Americans from nuclear war. They also are goals that can be achieved for less than the billions of dollars that the Bush Administration still wants to spend on research, development and production of a space-based defense. Quayle’s choice of words makes it possible for Congress to debate “Star Wars” on its merits, not on its promise.

As Quayle noted, not for the first time, the most promising “Star Wars” concept today is one being developed at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California. Even that is not very promising. Known as Brilliant Pebbles, it would replace an earlier idea for a system that would shoot down attacking missiles as they left their launch pads with pellets launched from platforms in space, the pellets being known in Pentagon jargon as “smart rocks.”

The approach would make the rocks smarter, hence Brilliant, and smaller, hence Pebbles. The new concept of small, self-contained units carrying their own power and their own high-powered computers was to overcome problems with the first generation of space-based designs that were, by last year, pointing toward eventual systems so bulky and complex as to be “unaffordable,” according to Aviation Week, a Washington-based magazine that follows space programs in detail.

But some analysts in Washington say that Brilliant Pebbles itself has gained so much weight as its design progressed that the differences between it and the first generation concept are “trivial.” A group of the country’s most experienced scientists who reexamined the Livermore design over the summer at the request of the Pentagon say their earlier judgment that it would not work soon, if ever, had not changed.

As hope for a missile-proof umbrella over the United States faded, the Pentagon rewrote the “Star Wars” mission. Under the new criteria, it now needs only to destroy half of the Soviet Union’s 300 or so biggest missiles, the SS-18s, or one-third of a launch of thousands of its smaller intercontinental missiles. The one-half or two-thirds of the missiles that would get through the shield would devastate the United States, but the Pentagon says that even a leaky defense would increase Soviet doubts that they could hit enough of their targets to make a surprise attack worth gambling on.

But if all the Pentagon wants is to reduce the odds that Soviet missiles could destroy American missiles in their silos, there are cheaper ways to do it. Jostling a Soviet missile enough to throw it a mile off target probably would let an American missile buried in its silo survive and attack. Richard Garwin of IBM suggested long ago that all it would take to do that would be to explode some crude aerial bomb filled with sand and gravel in the missile’s face.

The Pentagon plans to take another look in November at what it has to show for the $30 billion it has spent on “Star Wars.” It is not left empty-handed. Some of the money has good ideas for improving the quality of what spy satellites can see and hear. But Washington is no closer now than it was six years ago to knowing exactly what it is trying to do or what its space-based “Star Wars” shield would look like.

It is time to trim the “Star Wars” budget to basic research and accept the fact that if the missile defense that Reagan had in mind can be built at all, it cannot be built soon and that nothing else is worth the waste implicit in an all-out crash program aimed at getting something into space as soon as possible. It is also time, now that there is a tacit admission that “Star Wars” is no longer much of a bargaining chip, to start negotiating defenses along with offenses with the Soviet Union to eliminate surprises for either.