Bushes Preside as Nation’s New Carrier Is Christened : Defense: The $3.5-billion George Washington debuts to reduced world tensions and huge budget deficits.

America’s newest and costliest aircraft carrier--the $3.5-billion George Washington, a seeming anachronism in a time of reduced world tensions and record federal budget deficits--was christened here Saturday.

Before his wife, Barbara, smashed a bottle of champagne across the bow of the giant warship, President Bush told several thousand spectators that today is “not a time of war . . . (but) a time of triumph for the ideals all Americans hold dear.”

But the world has not entered “an era of perpetual peace,” he warned. The aircraft carrier, although increasingly the target of budget cutters, “remains an indispensable element in the American arsenal: projecting power. Preserving the peace.”

The 100,000-ton George Washington, 1,092 feet long with 4.5 acres of flight deck, can theoretically steam 1 million miles before its nuclear fuel needs replenishment. With its 85 aircraft and its protective shield of two cruisers, four destroyers and two submarines, the carrier battle group is the most powerful, mobile force for war or for peacetime shows of force around the world.

But its huge cost and that of its attendant vessels--more than $14 billion, plus a half-billion dollars a year in operating costs--has already prompted Pentagon plans to cut back the Navy from 14 to 12 carriers by 1995 as part of a projected 25% reduction in military forces.

Some critics want a further cut to 10 carriers, however, and two sister-ships of the Washington--whose keels are scheduled to be laid later this year and in 1992--could be delayed or even canceled because of the federal budget crunch.

The budget deficit this year is now estimated at more than $160 billion, not counting another $50 billion or more for the savings and loan bailout. The Administration’s budget request of $295 billion for the Pentagon next year (excluding the Energy Department) is expected to be cut at least $10 billion by Congress.

The controversy over carriers, however, did not detract from the ancient ceremony here Saturday before several thousand spectators, mostly sailors in white with their families and friends, under a steamy blue Virginia sky.

The President’s final words--”May God Bless the George Washington, all who sail in her, and all who fly from her deck”--seemed particularly poignant because Bush was himself a Navy pilot in World War II who was shot down in combat.

Then Mrs. Bush, after appearing anxious about how to grasp and swing the bottle, crashed it perfectly on the first try and grinned broadly up at her husband.

She may have been aware that among the many mishaps at such events, history records that an English lady once missed the ship entirely and hit a spectator, who sued for damages.