COLUMN LEFT : Spending for Cold War Arms We Don’t Need : The ‘Evil Empire’ is gone, but a gluttonous Pentagon pushes for more weaponry.

Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney’s media blitz in defense of maintaining a gluttonous military budget has one unchanging message: Now is not the time to reduce military spending.

Cheney cites as his first line of defense the 1990 budget summit agreement between the White House and Congress. In fact, the agreement actually represents an expedient political deal negotiated somewhere in the back rooms of the Officers’ Club at Andrews Air Force Base in September, 1990. Without public notice, this brokered deal committed taxpayers to two more years of increased spending for Cold War weapons.

Worse yet, the agreement put military spending in a protected box, priced the package at $582 billion for 1992-93, and decreed that not one dollar of this grotesque sum could be spent for non-military purposes.

On Oct. 9, 1990, Congress formally rubber-stamped the deal, thus authorizing an increase in military spending of $5 billion per year over the 1991 level.

A huge chunk of that sum was committed to pay for a long list of weapons developed during the Reagan Administration as part of the Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union. The most expensive of these systems are the nuclear and conventional weapons expressly intended to enable the United States to defeat the “evil empire” in a general war.

Since the budget deal was cut, however, the “evil empire” has disintegrated before our eyes. The Soviet Union may attempt to reinvent itself as a loose association of independent states and autonomous republics, but it is clear that it will be a pale imitation of our erstwhile adversary. Beset with intractable economic and political problems, what we used to call the Soviet Union will be more concerned with domestic order than foreign adventures.

There is simply no need to build or pay for anachronisms like the B-2 Stealth bomber, the Strategic Defense Initiative’s “Star Wars” system, Trident missiles, mobile MX and Midgetman missiles, Seawolf submarines, advanced tactical fighter planes and myriad other unneeded high-tech, big-ticket marvels. Giving up on these dinosaurs would save more than $50 billion in 1992-93 alone, and many times that amount over the next 20 years.

It is also easy to see that these sophisticated Cold War weapons have little relevance to regional conflicts or potential U.S. involvement in Iraq-type wars. They were sold to Congress by the Pentagon as essential for defeating the Soviet Union, the only potential adversary armed with modern military forces. Now, rather than abandon the programs and realize a peace dividend, the defense Establishment led by Dick Cheney argues that “uncertainty and instability” require continued investment of almost $300 billion per year to be prepared to fight the Soviets as well as deal with regional threats.

The frightening fact is that something like a mirror image of this same process is going on in Moscow. Many analysts and reporters, including Carey Goldberg and John Broder of the Los Angeles Times, see strong evidence that it was the Soviet version of a military-industrial complex that was a major force in the August coup attempt. Both arms factions, American and Soviet, have prospered during 40 years of Cold War and are unwilling to surrender future rewards through a mutual effort to reduce the military confrontation that drives the arms race. Each group points at the other as proof that now is not the time to reduce military spending.

It is extremely difficult to accept the wisdom of wasting money on weapons intended to destroy each other, after the Soviet Union has destroyed itself. If it is necessary for the United States to continue spending for Cold War weapons, that fact should be established in public debate by American leaders.

After all, we soon will be asked to vote for a President and a new Congress. Those who seek support by the voters should be willing to take a position on national defense and argue it openly. It is not acceptable to hide behind the decisions reached secretly at Andrews Air Force Base. The military budget must be reexamined in the light of very favorable developments in Moscow, and options must be presented to American citizens for their decision.

We are not hesitant to call on Moscow to make democracy work there; we must make it work in Washington as well.