When the Cold War Winds Down : THE POWER <i> By James Mills (Warner Books: $21.95; 406 pp.; 0-446-51393-8)</i>

Like certain defense contractors, writers of Cold War fiction nowadays confront a troublesome new world.

For 30-odd years, they plied their trade in a propitious atmosphere. Americans lived in the knowledge that the Soviet Union could--and, conceivably, might--blow us apart. Most of us, to get on with our lives, repressed the fear and anxiety this knowledge caused. But the fear simmered on the back burners of our minds; there is no other explanation for the emotional outpouring of gratitude and adulation that Mikhail Gorbachev has received for delivering us from it.

Cold War fiction thrived by tapping this wellspring of fear within us. At the height of the Cold War, even clumsy writers could, with the help of this shortcut to our angst , manage to be engrossing.

The end of the Cold War does not mean there will be no more good novels about Soviets and Americans--or even about East-West conflict--but it does mean that to be successful, they will have to be, first of all, good novels. Otherwise, shorn of the emotional afterburner provided by the Cold War, they will not engage us. The model no longer will be, say, “Seven Days in May.” It will be, perhaps, “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” And that’s a much harder model to knock off.

In “The Power,” James Mills, an author with a fine track record in crime fiction (“The Panic in Needle Park,” “Report to the Commissioner”), attempts to update the genre to cope with the recent changes in Moscow. He drops the story back seven or eight years to the interregnum period between the Brezhnev and Gorbachev eras, when the Bad Guys still ruled in Moscow.

He bases his plot on the notion that the Bad Guys are on the verge of completing the ultimate weapon by harnessing the related forces of paranormal psychology and Satan in a device that can, variously, trigger our nuclear warheads in their silos or cause our leaders to dissolve into blithering psychos.

Mills seems to want to give us a book that combines the appeal of a Tom Clancy techno-thriller with a Stephen King tale of the supernatural. Unfortunately, what he has produced reads as if Clancy wrote the supernatural stuff and King the bits about superpower politics.

Even his research is sloppy, though he mentions in an afterword that he consulted “hundreds of books and other publications.” Part of the plot, for instance, hinges on the idea that Yuri Andropov wants to remain alive until a Supreme Soviet meeting, at which time he can pass the mantle of leadership to Gorbachev. In fact, during those years, the Supreme Soviet decided nothing; it was an irrelevant rubber stamp.

Mills introduces his hero, Dr. John Hammond, employee of a standard, government-issue, top-secret agency, as he is breaking off a brief, inexplicable marriage to a woman with no discernible appeal. This entanglement serves only to lead to the conclusion that Dr. Hammond is a bit, as the Russians would say, glupy for having married the woman in the first place. A certain dullness indeed becomes advantageous a bit further along, when the plot requires him to believe that the Russian queen of the black arts needs his help to defect, even though she has previously demonstrated her mastery of teleportation.

This is one of two female characters in the novel. The evil one, Darya, has black hair and green eyes. In addition to developing the supernatural capability to destroy Civilization As We Know It, she has a diverting sexual sideline: Using only her mental powers, she can provoke crusty Marine generals sitting across a table to orgasm. When she puts body and mind into action at once, she introduces Dr. Hammond to what he calls “whole-body orgasms.” Her opposite number is an intensely religious young Russian girl (with blond hair and blue eyes) who, when she feels a yen for Dr. Hammond coming on, prays for relief.

That is one sentiment that the reader wading through this novel can identify with.