Bad Time for More Star Wars : With so many more pressing needs, why appropriate any more money?

A British Army ballad of World War I had it that “old soldiers never die, they just fade away.”

With some help from the Bush Administration, “Star Wars”--the failed attempt to build a nuclear missile defense--stubbornly refuses to do either. It is time Congress gave the Strategic Defense Initiative a proper push down the road toward oblivion before it gobbles up any more than the $30 billion it has already consumed, leaving little to show for the money.

There is no time to waste unless Americans are willing to spend even more than the $4.15 billion that the most expensive military research program in history will spend this fiscal year.

Two recent episodes make that clear. One is a tedious accounting by the Associated Press that does something the Pentagon has refused to do: Tell taxpayers where their “Star Wars” funds have gone.

The news agency found, for example, that $7.7 billion of the total was spent on projects that were simply killed, either because they did not work or because there might be a better way to go about creating a defense system.

One project that never worked was a nuclear-powered X-Ray laser that was used, or misused, by physicist Edward Teller to persuade former President Reagan to go for “Star Wars” in the first place. The project, sold as the first space weapon with promise for exploding enemy rockets the minute they were launched, consumed $1.8 billion before it was buried.

Although there are bits and pieces of hardware scattered around the country, nothing resembling a workable “Star Wars” system exists anywhere--not even on paper. There is, in short, nothing at all to show for the other $21.3 billion.

The other episode is an announcement by a Pentagon official that President Bush plans to talk with Russian President Boris Yeltsin next month about a mutual program to expand the phantom defense system to protect all right-thinking nations from terrorist missile attacks.

Yeltsin, who is billions of dollars short of being able to feed his people, let alone rebuild his economy, has better things to do with his money. So does Bush, if he would think carefully about it.