In addition, the Gipper has had large machines and sprawling tractsof infrastructure named after him. For weapons buffs, there is the RonaldReagan aircraft carrier, which could end up as the most  expensivecombat ship ever built. And for anyone who can still scrape up the changeto fly the shuttle  from New York to Washington, there is the bracingexperience of hearing the pilot say, "We are now beginning our descentinto Ronald Reagan National Airport." What are we to make of this longingfor the return of the Reaganesque? Is it just that we want a "reassuring"presence back at the helm—someone who, like Reagan, could run up the biggest budget deficits in the history of the Republic and still maintain his reputationas a fiscal conservative? Or have we simply exhausted the possibilitiesof `60s and `70s nostalgia, so that it is now time for the 1980s to haveits moment in the sun? 

Perhaps we can begin to answer these questions by examining the fateof one of the more expensive bits of Reagan memorabilia, the StrategicDefense Initiative (SDI), popularly known as the Star Wars program. Reagan'sdream of a high-tech shield to protect against incoming ballistic missilesis alive and well. The original Star Wars vision—a multi-tiered systemof weapons and sensors that could simultaneously destroy thousands of Sovietmissiles—has been superseded by the more modest goal of protecting thenation against an accidental missile launch by China or Russia, or deliberateattacks by so-called rogue states like Iran, Iraq, and North Korea (noneof which currently have missiles that can reach U.S. soil).  In keepingwith this diminished mission, the 1990s version of Reagan's dream has beenrenamed the Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) program. Like the B-2 bomber,which House Budget Committee chairman John Kasich has dubbed the "Draculaweapon" for its remarkable ability to escape the budget cutter's ax, theStar Wars program is currently rolling merrily along, impervious to technicalglitches, cost overruns, and massive shifts  in the geopolitical landscape. This aspect of the Star Wars project—itsproponents' unflappable optimism, coupled with a stubborn disregard ofhard facts—makes it the perfect monument to Ronald Reagan. 

Star Wars: Impotent and Obsolete? 
The most remarkable thing about Reagan's Star Wars plan, which wasannounced with great fanfare in March 1983 with the ambitious goal of renderingnuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete," is how consistently it has failedto meet virtually every performance goal that has been set out for it.Many of the weapons that were to make up Reagan's ambitious "astrodome"defense, such as Dr. Edward Teller's highly touted x-ray lasers and particlebeamweapons, proved to be uniquely unsuited to the task at hand. As strategicexperts John Pike, Bruce Blair, and Stephen Schwartz observe in their pathbreakingnew study, Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear  Weapons Since 1940, "the greatest accomplishment of the first fouryears of the SDI program consisted in learning what technologies did notwork. At the beginning, the program contemplated a bewildering array ofdevices that might be of use in shooting down missiles and warheads. Butmost of these gadgets, such as railguns, space-based radars, lasers, andparticle beams, were found wanting."¹ 

The problems with the original Star Wars vision went beyond the failureof individual components to meet minimum performance requirements. Thewhole concept was fatally flawed. As Canadian computer expert David Parnaspointed out just two years after Reagan's 1983 Star Wars speech, managinga battle that would involve targeting tens of thousands of incoming missiles,warheads, and decoys without error is beyond the capability of any computersoftware system. Even a .1 percent failure rate in intercepting incomingnuclear weapons could mean the annihilation of one or more major Americancities. Parnas was so convinced of the futility of the Star Wars plan thathe resigned  his position as a member of SDI's battle management advisory panel.That same year, in 1985, the physicists David Wright and Lisbeth Gronlundorganized a campaign in which over 7,200 scientists and engineers signeda "pledge of non-participation" in Star Wars  research on the grounds that it was a fraudulent and dangerous program.This was all the more remarkable when one considers that the Pentagon wasoffering to give university-based scientists millions of dollars in researchfunds to explore missile defense technologies.² 

The daunting technical obstacles to fielding an effective missile defensecombined with the end of the Cold War to cool the U.S. government's ardorfor Reagan's Star Wars plan. By the early 1990s, missile defense was anafterthought on the nation's security agenda. Yet the Pentagon and themilitary services have continued to pour research and development moneydown the drain in the quixotic quest for missile defenses. According toStephen Schwartz of the Brookings Institution, the United States has spent$55 billion on missile defense in the 15 years since Reagan launched SDI,with precious little to show for it.³  Thefact that the goal of the program is now far less ambitious than Reagan'soriginal vision of an impenetrable shield that would protect against thousandsof incoming missiles has not measurably improved its potential for success.Blocking a few stray missiles should be easier than blunting a coordinatedattack involving tens of thousands of warheads. But to borrow a phrasethat Lockheed Martin's chairman Norman Augustine used in a different context,the missile defense program is still "unblemished by success." 

As Bradley Graham of the Washington Post reported in a front-page articlethat ran on April 27 of this year, the best known Star Wars component,a "hit-to-kill" vehicle designed to intercept incoming missiles well beforethey reach U.S. territory, has failed in seven of nine tests conductedin this decade.4 Meanwhile, Lockheed Martin's Theater High Altitude AreaDefense (THAAD) program, a sort of super Patriot missile designed to defendagainst medium-range ballistic missiles, is zero for five in tests conductedto date.⁵ 

A panel of independent experts appointed by the Pentagon and headedby former air force chief of staff Larry Welch warned in a report issuedthis past February that the entire ballistic missile defense effort wason a headlong "rush to failure" because of pressure by Congress to deploya system before adequate testing has been done.⁶The Welch Commission's warnings echo those issued nearly 20 years ago bythe outgoing secretary of defense, Harold Brown, to the incoming Reaganadministration regarding the over hyped missile defense efforts of thatera. 

But the issue of whether or not Star Wars can actually work does notappear to be uppermost in the thinking of its proponents. In August 1993,Tim Weiner of the New York Times revealed that the army had rigged a key1984 Star Wars test by planting a remote-controlled explosive in the targetmissile that would cause it blow up on cue whether or not it was hit bythe interceptor missile. When Weiner revealed this monstrous deception,former Reagan administration officials argued that it was more importantfor the Soviets to believe that we could intercept missiles in flight thanit was  for the United States to actually have had the capability to do so.⁷Of course, if we were to take such thinking to its logicalextreme, the United States could today build a cheap "Potemkin" missiledefense system under the auspices of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas,never mind Boeing and Lockheed Martin. 

It is hard to see how we could do worse. We are spending $4 billiona year, year in and year out, for a ballistic missile defense effort thathas yet to deploy or successfully test a single reliable device. In fact,the most impressive products to come out of our $55 billion, 15year investmentin missile defenses to date are the flashy "artist's conceptions" of howfuture systems might work, which the military services and defense contractorsduly trot out whenever Congress threatens to cut back the Star Wars budgetby a few hundred million dollars. 

Dole, Gingrich, Lott and Star Wars Revival 
If Star Wars was a domestic program, it would have long since beenslashed to pieces by conservative budget cutters looking for money to payfor tax cuts and budgetary deficit  reductions. But as often happens in the warped world of national securitythinking, the program has "failed upward" to the point where it may wellend up being deployed, whether we need it or not. 

The latest push for deployment of Star Wars has its roots in Speakerof the House Newt Gingrich's master plan, the Contract With America, whichwas modestly subtitled, "The Bold Plan by Rep. Newt Gingrich, Rep. DickArmey, and the House of Representatives to Change the Nation." Under theheading"Strong National Defense," Gingrich and Armey's "bold plan" of 1994 calledfor "renewing America's commitment to an effective national missile defenseby requiring the Defense Department to deploy antiballistic missile systemscapable of defending the United States against ballistic missile attack."⁸   

However, Gingrich and Armey's Star Wars plans suffered a surprisingsetback in the summer of 1996, when fiscal conservatives of both partiesjoined hands with liberal Democrats in the House of Representatives todefeat an amendment that would have mandated deployment of a missile defensesystem by as early as the year 2000. The decisive factor in stalling Gingrichand Armey's forced march to deployment was a Congressional Budget Officeanalysis that reminded members that even a modest ballistic missile defensesystem could cost tens of billions of dollars.⁹   

Star Wars fared no better in the brief cameo appearance it made in BobDole's ill-fated 1996 presidential campaign. When Dole tried to whip upfear in California over the dangers of Chinese missiles raining down onLos Angeles, his rhetorical exertions were greeted with a collective yawnby Californians who were more concerned about the state's floundering economy. 

After falling flat in the House and on the presidential campaign trail,interest in ballistic missile defenses has now shifted to the Senate, whereMississippi senator Thad Cochran's Defend America Act has 50 cosponsors.An attempt to pass Cochran's bill—which mandates deployment of a limitedantiballistic missile system by the year 2003—failed in May of this year,when Star Wars boosters could not muster the 60 votes needed to bring themeasure to the Senate floor. In a chilling display of party unity, however,all 55 Republican senators voted to bring the bill to the floor, whereit would have passed without difficulty.¹⁰The anti–Star Wars coalition is stronger in the House, so even if Cochranand Majority Leader Trent Lott succeed in ramming through a Senate billin support of their goal to see missile defenses deployed by 2003, theHouse should be able to block the bill in a House-Senate conference. 

Despite their recent political setbacks, Star Wars boosters are spoilingfor a fight over missile defense. In an excellent article by Carla AnneRobbins that ran in the Wall Street Journal on August 7 of this year, RepublicanNational Committee chairman Jim Nicholson identifies missile defenses as"the most important [security] issue of the 2000 election." In addition,Robbins reports, Jack Kemp's Empower America organization is trying towin over some members of the Senate to the cause by running pro–Star Warsradio ads in targeted states like Nevada. Listeners are told: "We are onlyone vote shy of ensuring the safety of you and your family. But the peoplestanding in the way are Nevada's own  senators." 

For a project so technically deficient to get this close to receivingthe go-ahead for deployment suggests that there is more going on here thanmeets the eye. Indeed, the Star Wars program is driven by deep psychological,political, and economic factors that have made it extremely difficult tostop simply on the merits of the program itself. 

Soothing Our Fears: America Invulnerable?  
As a nation that has been largely spared foreign intervention or theoccupation of  its own soil, the United States has developed an approach to nationalsecurity that is too often based on the unrealistic expectation that wecan find a foolproof—technical or political—fix that can protect us inany and every worst-case scenario. This quest for "absolute security,"which James Chace and Caleb Carr analyzed in some detail ten years agoin their book, America Invulnerable, is a fundamental pillar of the StarWars vision.¹¹ 

When Ronald Reagan decided to take the advice of the scientists, soldiers,and businessmen who were pushing the Star Wars plan—led by H-bomb inventorEdward Teller and retired army general Daniel O. Graham, and amply financedby right-wing business leaders like Joseph Coors—his primary concern wasto make the American public feel safe from the horrors of a nuclear attack.¹² The only truly effective course—getting rid of nuclear weapons—didnot appeal to Reagan and his inner circle at that point, at least not inthe manner put forward by the European Nuclear Disarmament (END) movementand the U.S.-based Nuclear Weapons Freeze campaign. Instead, Reagan optedto seek a technical "solution" to our nuclear vulnerability by pursuinga multi-tiered antimissile system, which, if fully deployed, could havecost up to $1 trillion.¹³ George Keyworth,an Edward Teller protégé who served as Reagan's science advisor,told television journalist Bill Moyers in 1984 that Reagan was extremelyconcerned about the nuclear freeze initiative, and that he wanted to respondby doing something that would "give people some hope" that they would notbe incinerated in a nuclear holocaust. Reagan's March 1983 Star Wars speech,with its grand promises to render nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete"and to change "the course of human history," was the first salvo in theReagan administration's campaign to put a positive spin on the nucleararms race.¹⁴  

It may be possible to give the public false hope by offering it a technicalfix to the nuclear threat, à la Star Wars, though it would be safer,albeit more difficult, to address the problem directly by drastically reducingthe world's nuclear arsenals. As the nuclear tests in India and Pakistan,and Iran's test this past summer of a mid-range ballistic missile, beginto attract media attention to the nuclear threat for the first time sincethe end of the Cold War, the question will be whether the public will succumbto the reassuring (but false) promise of a technical fix to the problemof nuclear weapons. 

Defending against Rogue States  
The latest turn in the Star Wars debate comes courtesy of former Fordadministration secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, who chaired a congressionallymandated panel  that announced with great fanfare this past July that such "rogue states"as North Korea, Iran, and Iraq may be as little as 5 years away from developingmissiles that could reach U.S. soil, not the 10 to 12 years that officialU.S. intelligence estimates have been suggesting. When the unclassifiedsummary of the report was released to the public, Newt Gingrich, the primarypolitical sponsor of the Rumsfeld panel, launched into rhetorical overkill,describing the findings as "the most important warning about our nationalsecurity since the end of the Cold War."¹⁵  

The Rumsfeld report was treated with undue respect by most of the nation'seditors and reporters. Few of the published accounts of the panel's findingsbothered to point out that several key players involved in this allegedlyobjective exercise are heavily invested in the Star Wars project, politicallyand economically. Rumsfeld himself was the chair of Bob Dole's failed 1996presidential bid, which tried to push Star Wars on a largely uninterestedpublic. More important, Rumsfeld works closely with the  Center forSecurity Policy, a pro–Star Wars think tank run by Frank Gaffney, a formerPentagon official in the Reagan administration, who has devoted his postgovernmentcareer to spreading the Star Wars creed. The center has received over $1million in donations from companies such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin(both major beneficiaries of Star Wars research funds). 

Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott, who also pushed for the Rumsfeld panel,are both firmly on  record in favor of deploying a missile defense system as soon as possible.Lott has already managed to get one of the Star Wars laser programs movedto his state. Gingrich, a longtime Star Wars booster, has helped make surethat Congress annually appropriates roughly a billion research dollarsmore than the Pentagon asks for—to the direct benefit of Lockheed Martin,which maintains a major facility in Marietta, Georgia, just outside theSpeaker's district.¹⁶  

One would have thought that self-respecting journalists would have consideredthe source before uncritically trumpeting the Rumsfeld panel's findings.The most embarrassing puff piece on the Rumsfeld report came in mid-July,when television talk show host Charlie Rose aired a shamelessly unbalancedpresentation featuring Rumsfeld and fellow Republican panelist Paul Wolfowitz,with no one on the other side of the debate present. Rose echoed the toneof controlled hysteria inherent in the Rumsfeld report by repeating Gingrich's"warning" remark several times during the broadcast. In essence, the segmentwas an infomercial for the Lott/Gingrich/Rumsfeld view of the looming threatfrom Third World missiles. 

If a Charlie Rose, with a research staff at his disposal, can fall forthe Star Wars myth, what chance does the general public have of sortingfact from fiction? On the heels of the Rumsfeld report, the RepublicanNational Committee (RNC) announced the results of a poll that asked peoplewhether or not they wanted to be defended from a Chinese missile attack.Not surprisingly, the RNC's loaded question yielded the intended response:75 percent of those polled said they wanted to be defended from ChineseICBMs. 

Of course, poll-driven foreign policy discussions have grave weaknesses,the most important being that they fail to provide citizens with the minimalfactual information they need to make informed decisions. The reason Chinawill not attack the United States with nuclear missiles is the same nowas it was two decades ago—because the minute it did so, China would beexposed to a totally devastating counterattack. The same would hold truefor North Korea, Iraq, or Iran, should they ever actually acquire the necessarytechnology to mount a weapon of mass destruction on a bomb that could reachU.S. soil. 

In fact, neither of the two main reasons that Rumsfeld offered in explainingU.S. vulnerability to an attack from Third World ballistic missiles—theavailability of technical assistance from other countries and the possibilityof a "sneak attack" from a country with a clandestine missile developmentprogram—hold up to scrutiny. 

How Should America Respond?  
On this very issue of foreign assistance to countries seeking the meansto deliver  weapons of mass destruction, the United States has been part of theproblem, not part of the solution. U.S. sales of advanced F-16 fighterjets to Pakistan have provided that nation with a reliable, reusable meansof delivering a crude nuclear device, whether or not its much vaunted missileprogram ever succeeds. And when President Bush broke a decade-old pledgeto China by selling 150 F-16s to Taiwan during the 1992 presidential campaign,he did irreparable harm to U.S. security relations with Beijing, makingit that much harder for Washington to ride herd on China's transfers ofmissile technology to Pakistan, Syria, and other customers of ill repute. 

More recently, as we have now learned in connection with the ongoingWhite House fundraising scandals, the Clinton administration has made itmuch easier for companies like Loral and Hughes Electronics (both major contributors of soft money to the Democratic Party) to transfer satellitetechnology and services to China, some of which has helped Beijing improvethe accuracy of its ballistic missiles. Therefore, if Rumsfeld and othersbelieve that foreign technology transfers are driving the Third World missilethreat, their first priority should be to get the U.S. government to tightenup its own policy on exports of missile-related technologies. Only thencan we credibly press countries like China and Russia to curb their owndangerous exports of missile and nuclear weapons components.¹⁷  

As for the "sneak attack" argument, it is even weaker upon examinationthan the foreign  assistance argument. As Paul Wolfowitz put the case to Charlie Rose,a closed society like North Korea might possibly be able to hide an entireballistic missile development effort up to the moment of the first test,after which point that nation could be ready to launch a missile attackon the United States within six months. 

Wolfowitz's scenario is farfetched for many reasons. First and foremost,unless a foreign leader is on a suicide mission, there is no logic to usinga single ballistic missile (or even a handful of them) to attack the UnitedStates. If the leaders of Iraq or North Korea were to take such a foolishstep, all they would accomplish would be to announce to the world wherethe attack came from—unlike concealing a bomb in a suitcase, it is notpossible to hide the origination point of a ballistic missile launch. Havingmade that announcement (and used up its stockpile of ballistic missilesin the process), the aggressor nation would then be completely unable todefend itself from a U.S. counterattack using nuclear or conventional bombs. 

Moreover, it is quite likely that any attempt by a Third World "roguestate" to develop ballistic missiles that could reach the United Stateswould be stopped long before a system could be deployed. After its firsttest, the nation in question would most likely face a preemptive strikeagainst its missile production facilities (unlike research sites, suchfacilities would be extremely difficult to hide). Thus, the "sneak attack"rational for Star Wars is wholly implausible. Furthermore, as Rumsfeldpanel member Richard Garwin noted in an op-ed piece in the New York Times,no defensive system currently under consideration could completely neutralizethe threat posed by even a small number of ballistic missiles. Garwin rightlyobserves that "the best way to defend against possible attack is to preventcountries like North Korea, Iran, and Iraq from getting these missilesin the first place."¹⁸  

Missile development efforts in the Third World are much more worrisomefor their regional security implications than for their purported threatto the American homeland. The fact that Iran has recently tested a missilethat can reach Israel is a real security concern, as is the nascent racebetween India and Pakistan to test nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.But these regional threats could be more easily addressed with a robustresearch program on defenses against medium-range missiles that would costno more than $500 million to $1 billion per year—a small fraction of thebloated $4 billion per year now going for Star Wars research. But, of course,a focus on the real threats would hardly be enough to keep the Boeingsand Lockheed Martins feeding at the Pentagon trough in the style to whichthey have become accustomed. 

If we want to avoid burdening our children and grandchildren with anunworkable, dangerous, and immensely costly project, the time to starteducating ourselves and our fellow citizens about the costs of the StarWars program is now. Even without a full grasp of the technical issuesinvolved, most people know a boondoggle when they see one. If the technicalfiascoes and special interest politics behind the Star Wars facade wereto become common knowledge, this program could be relegated to the dustbin of history where it belongs. 

In the meantime, anyone who wants to promote Ronald Reagan's legacyshould consider his more constructive contributions to nuclear weaponspolicy, such as pressing for the elimination of nuclear missiles from Europeor signing the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START)—the first nucleararms control agreement in history to actually reduce the number of nuclearweapons in the stockpiles of the superpowers. As Jonathan Schell has pointedout in his recent book, The Gift of Time, with respect to nuclear weapons,Ronald Reagan was the "most fervently abolitionist president of the ColdWar period."¹⁹ So if we must pay homageto Ronald Reagan, let us honor Reagan the nuclear abolitionist, not Reaganthe Star Warrior.   

Notes  
This article is adapted from a study of the Star Wars lobby that will be  released by the World Policy Institute later this year. 

 1. John Pike, Bruce Blair, and Stephen I. Schwartz, "Defendingagainst the  Bomb," in Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. NuclearWeapons Since 1940, ed.,  Stephen I. Schwartz (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1998), p. 291. 
  2. Interview with David Wright, July 30, 1998; the author isin possession of  a copy of the "pledge of non-participation" that was circulated in1985/86; see also Charles Mohr,  "Scientist Quits Antimissile Panel Saying Task Is Impossible," NewYork Times, July 12, 1985, cited  in Schwartz, ed., Atomic Audit, p. 291. 
 3. Figure provided by Stephen I. Schwartz, based on his estimatesin Atomic  Audit, and on more recent missile defense expenditures. 
 4. Bradley Graham, "Antimissile Program's Bumpy Path," WashingtonPost,  April 27, 1998. 
 5. "Missile Defense System Fails," Associated Press, May 12,1998. 
 6. Report of the Panel on Reducing Risk in Missile Defense FlightTest  Programs (Welch Commission), February 27, 1998. The full text of thisreport is available on the  worldwide web via the home page of the Space Policy Project of theFederation of American  Scientists (www.fas.org/spp/starwars/program/welch/welch1.html). 
 7. Tim Weiner, "Lies and Rigged `Star Wars' Test Fooled the Kremlin,and  Congress," New York Times, August 18, 1993; cited in Schwartz, ed.,Atomic Audit, p. 295. 
 8. Contract With America: The Bold Plan by Rep. Newt Gingrich,Rep. Dick  Armey, and the House Republicans to Change the Nation (New York: TimesBooks, 1994), p. 93. 
 9. Budgetary Implications of S1635—The Defending America Actof 1996  (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Budget Office, May 17, 1996); seealso, "Star Wars, the Sequel,"  New York Times, August 7, 1996. 
 10. For a summary of the recent debate in the Senate, see William D. Hartung,  "Spacey Missile Defense," The Nation, July 27/August 3, 1998. 
 11. James Chace and Caleb Carr, America Invulnerable: The Quest for Absolute  Security from 1812 to Star Wars (New York: Summit Books, 1988). 
 12. On the genesis of Star Wars, see Gregg Herken, "The Earthly Origins of Star  Wars," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, October 1987; for the definitive account of  Edward Teller's role, see William J. Broad, Teller's War: The Top-Secret Story Behind the Star Wars  Deception (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992). 
 13. Schwartz, ed., Atomic Audit, p. 291, n. 61.   14. Reagan's speech is cited in Herken, "The Earthly Originsof Star Wars," p 20. 
 15. Jessica Webster and Patrick J. Sloyan, "Panel Gauges a MissileThreat,"  Newsday, July 16, 1998. 
 16. Information on the Center for Security Policy and its links to Donald  Rumsfeld is drawn from the center's 1996 annual report. On Gingrichand Lockheed, see William D.  Hartung, "The Speaker from Lockheed?" The Nation, January 30, 1995. 
 17. For a fuller version of the argument on the need for the United States to take  preventive action against nuclear proliferation, see William D. Hartung,"Hypocrisy Paves the Way  for Bomb Tests," Newsday, June 18, 1998. 
 18. Richard L. Garwin, "Keeping Enemy Missiles at Bay," New York Times, July  28, 1998. 
 19. Jonathan Schell, The Gift of Time: The Case for Abolishing Nuclear  Weapons Now (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998), p. 15.