‘Star Wars’ Program Blooms as Cold War Fades : Pentagon: The missile defense system gets a whopping funds increase in a remarkable political reversal. Even Soviets say kind things about it.

With intercontinental bombers off nuclear alert, MX missiles left to languish in the ground and the defense budget facing cuts of a third, the Strategic Defense Initiative--arguably Washington’s most controversial challenge to the old “Evil Empire”--is about to blossom in the warmth of the post-Cold War world.

Without fanfare, Congress last week adopted a 1992 defense appropriations bill that gives the anti-missile program $4.15 billion--its highest funding level ever and a whopping boost of almost $1 billion over the preceding year. And this comes at a time when other expensive weapons systems are headed for big declines.

The increase underlies a remarkable political reversal in the program that then-President Ronald Reagan launched into tumultuous debate in 1983. Longtime Democratic critics like House Armed Services Committee Chairman Les Aspin (D-Wis.) and Rep. Charles E. Bennett (D-Fla.), who once seemed ready to hound SDI into abandonment, helped smooth the way for this year’s big investment. Even many Soviet officials, for years vilifiers of the American initiative, now are saying kind things about “Star Wars,” as the program is frequently called.

In drafting the bill this year, House and Senate lawmakers wound up haggling over spending levels and deployment schedules for the system’s hundreds of interceptor missiles. For the first time, they did not dispute that this is an idea whose time has come.

“This is the biggest thing to happen to strategic defenses since the 1983 ‘Star Wars’ speech” by Reagan, according to John Pike, a space and defense analyst with the Federation of American Scientists. “For the first time in 20 years, you’ve got the Congress on record saying that, for practical purposes, we’re going to deploy some defenses against nuclear missiles. And once you start doing that . . . you’re not discussing virtue any more. You’re just haggling over the price.”

The turnabout comes as the result of a major downsizing and good timing.

“Star Wars” no longer is the expansive missile shield that would protect against a massive Soviet nuclear attack envisioned by Reagan. Now it is Global Protection Against Limited Strikes--or GPALS--a smaller, cheaper model that would pick off a limited number of incoming missiles fired accidentally or maliciously by any of the growing number of nuclear powers.

“On the House side, especially, there has been a key political shift,” said defense analyst Barry Blechman. “Many of the centrist Democrats have concluded that the politics of opposing missile defenses are not good: It’s hard to explain to people why they shouldn’t be protected.”

Against the Soviet monolith, the theory of nuclear deterrence was a basic pillar of defense policy--the Soviets would be deterred from attacking by knowledge that the United States could annihilate them with a nuclear assault in retaliation.

But against the new world’s would-be despots? “I can’t convince my mother that it means we should be vulnerable to the whims of a madman with a nuclear weapon and the missile to deliver it,” said Blechman, chairman of the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington.

The acceptance of any form of “Star Wars” marks a watershed for Congress, which first debated extensive missile defenses in the early-1970s and rejected them in favor of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. That document offers safety through mutual danger.

“It represents Congress’ first post-Cold War weapons decision,” Pike said. “All the other procurement decisions they’ve made in recent years have had to do with weapons that we don’t need. But this is the first one they’ve decided we do need. It’ll be a focal point for defining what the post-Cold War period is going to look like.”

The transformation began last January when President Bush ordered the politically embattled program to refocus itself on a smaller missile attack and pared the overall cost to $41 billion. Reagan’s original “Star Wars” plan had envisioned an elaborate system of multitiered defenses and a budget that Blechman estimated eventually would have reached $770 billion.

In recent years, though the Republican White House managed to keep it alive and funded, even the program’s most ardent supporters had begun to question whether it would ever really be built. Its technical feasibility was openly questioned by many scientists and its immense potential cost made it a target for budget cutters and political opponents.

The Bush scale back generated political goodwill. But the Persian Gulf War added a big shot of public support.

The spectacular image of Patriot missile batteries knocking out Iraqi Scud missiles in flight took firm hold among American television viewers and sold the concept as no political speech could.

It proved that the basic technology for destroying an incoming missile before it lands--”hitting a bullet with a bullet”--is not a fantasy. “This time a year ago, the Strategic Defense Initiative was going down the tubes along with everything else,” Pike said. “But people saw the Patriot on CNN, and they thought it worked.”

The war also dramatized that non-conventional weapons, and the means to deliver them, are spreading inexorably throughout the Third World and into the hands of unpredictable leaders who might not yield to the threat of devastating retaliation. The Soviet coup in August and the emergence of several independent, nuclear-armed republics in the old Soviet Union further underscored the threat.

“The doctrine of deterrence . . . worked for two generations, but it is no longer sufficient in itself in this new era,” Aspin said in a recent speech. “We have lived with nuclear overkill for decades. We could stand to err on the side of overprotection in the future.”

Since the new threatening scenarios involve a few missiles rather than many, Administration officials said, the answer is a limited system like Global Protection, which in the Pentagon’s conception would start in 1996. It would reactivate a single defensive site in Grand Forks, N.D., and build five new ones around the country, each equipped with ground-based interceptor missiles that could shoot down incoming warheads. The batteries would be supported by a constellation of space-based sensors.

The Pentagon also hopes to build an $11-billion system of 1,000 “brilliant pebbles,” small non-nuclear interceptor missiles that would orbit the Earth and pick off missiles aimed at virtually any country.

Though the quiet conversion of influential lawmakers like Nunn and Aspin has revitalized the program, the debate is not over. Lawmakers are expected to continue haggling over whether and how quickly the program should breach the ABM Treaty, which attempts to control the arms race by limiting radar and anti-missile sites.

Both the space-based and the extensive ground-based systems envisioned by the Pentagon would require either the abandonment of the two-decade-old treaty or its substantial renegotiation with the Soviets. Since the pact is a key element of the U.S.-Soviet relationship, some in Congress fear that abandoning it will stir animosity and fear in the Soviet republics, which could not counter with a system of their own.

Critics are also concerned that the Pentagon will use the stripped-down Global Protection system to move gradually toward the full-blown, vastly expensive “Star Wars” program that it still might like to have.

But advocates insist that the suspicions are groundless and that the counterproposals--including limiting Global Protection to the one ground-based site that the ABM treaty would allow--would not do the job. One site like Grand Forks could provide protection at most for the continental United States, leaving Hawaii, Alaska and the rest of the world exposed, according to Edward T. Gerry, SDI systems architect.

SDI supporters are also trying to deflect some sentiment for limiting the system to the ground to avoid the suspicious step of putting weapons in space. If that happens, in addition to narrower protection, the concept might lose some of its traditional supporters.