House Votes $2.4-Billion Cut in ‘Star Wars’ Funds : Defense: Facing defeat, supporters put off fight on Stealth bomber cutbacks. Hawks unable to use gulf crisis to avoid deep spending reductions.

The House voted Tuesday to deepen severe Senate-approved cuts in the Strategic Defense Initiative anti-missile program, despite White House protests that the reductions “would devastate SDI, forcing us to delay critical tests and cancel contracts.”

The House voted to slash $2.4 billion from President Bush’s $4.7-billion funding request for next year’s “Star Wars” program. The Senate last month recommended a $1.1-billion reduction. A Senate-House conference committee is likely to split the difference.

Besides approving deep cuts, both chambers have also voted to force the Administration to emphasize ground-based SDI systems, thus slowing the President’s plans for possible deployment of the space-based “brilliant pebbles” missile defense system within five years.

Meanwhile, proponents of the B-2 Stealth bomber made no attempt to delete a proposal to halt the program at 15 planes as the House debated a $289-billion defense bill for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1.

Faced with almost certain defeat on the House floor, the B-2 advocates said that they will try to salvage plans for building 75 of the high-tech planes in a House-Senate conference committee. The Senate has endorsed Bush’s request for funding two new planes next year.

The developments showed that the dramatically diminished Soviet threat still dominates the defense spending debate in Congress, overpowering attempts by military hawks to use the Persian Gulf crisis as a rationale for avoiding deep cuts.

By 225 to 189, the House approved an amendment by Rep. Charles E. Bennett (D-Fla.) to fund SDI at $2.3 billion in fiscal 1991, compared with Bush’s request of $4.7 billion and the $3.6 billion approved by the Senate last month.

Bennett said that his aim is to have Senate-House conferees on the defense bill wind up agreeing on about $3 billion, the number recommended by several former military chiefs in congressional testimony.

In earlier votes, the House rejected attempts by Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove) and Rep. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) to achieve higher SDI funding and defeated an effort by two other Californians, Reps. Ronald V. Dellums (D-Berkeley) and Barbara Boxer (D-Greenbrae), to cut $800 million more than Bennett’s amendment.

SDI proponents argued that, despite the fading Soviet threat, “robust funding” is needed to mount defenses against at least 15 Third World countries that are developing long-range missiles. Six of the countries, including Iraq and Libya, are also moving toward placing nuclear or chemical warheads on their missiles, according to the CIA.

Kyl warned that Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had expressed the desire to lob missiles at U.S. cities and that Iraq already has the ability to fire potent missiles at U.S. troops deployed in Saudi Arabia.

“What happens when the next Saddam creates a crisis?” Kyl asked. “We have got to be able to fund SDI at a level today that enables us in five years to be able to defend ourselves against some tinhorn dictator armed with missiles that can reach the continental United States as well as our forces abroad.”

SDI critics contended that effective missile interceptors can be developed for much less money. Meanwhile, they said, the “savings” can be used to purchase conventional equipment shown to be lacking in the massive deployment of troops to the Persian Gulf.

“We need to buy additional fast sealift vessels and additional minesweepers,” said Rep. Dave McCurdy (D-Okla.). “We need to provide for hazardous duty pay for our men and women and protective gear against chemical and biological weapons.”