Fading ‘Star Wars’

Lt. Gen. James A. Abrahamson, who struggled for five years to make President Reagan’s dream of a defense against nuclear weapons not only seem credible but also come true, is what is known as a good soldier. Good soldiers follow orders without asking questions, even when the questions beg to be asked.

Now Abrahamson is leaving the program, which is known formally as the Strategic Defense Initiative and more widely as “Star Wars,” acknowledging that its years as a pet project of the White House are about to end--no matter who is elected President in November. “I reluctantly have concluded that the program will best be served by allowing new leadership to present new policy and direction,” the general said in his letter of resignation.

As The Times’ John Broder reported from Washington two weeks before the resignation was announced, Abrahamson already was trying to find a place for Star Wars to hibernate after its heady years under Reagan.

For an advocate of Star Wars, that was prudent. Congress had started to balk at pouring billions of dollars a year into a program that existed mostly in the minds of technicians. Nobody except artists with wild imaginations seemed able to make even a crude sketch of what a Star Wars system might really look like. Other military services were ganging up on Star Wars because their own budgets were being cut to make room for it. Neither Vice President George Bush nor Gov. Michael S. Dukakis was enthusiastic about unlimited budgets for Star Wars.

The best thing that could happen to the program would be a return to the quiet pattern of pure research in which it existed for about 30 years before Reagan, in a speech in the spring of 1983, turned missile defense into a high-visibility blend of technology and politics.

In the speech, Reagan challenged the nation’s scientists to find a way to destroy nuclear missiles before they could reach the United States, to make nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.

Some scientists, notably physicist Edward Teller, said that the job would be a snap, encouraging Americans to think of a system that would ward off missiles the way umbrellas ward off raindrops. Others doubted that Star Wars could be built in less than several generations, if then. And when it developed that Teller and his associates at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory were making claims for a laser weapon that were not supported by test results, Congress turned its full attention to the skeptics.

The real winner in the recent turn in the fortunes of Star Wars can and should be arms-control negotiations. The most frantic advocates of getting some kind of defense system into orbit as fast as possible have been willing to scrap the one truly durable arms agreement of the nuclear age in their haste. The 1972 anti-ballistic-missile defense treaty sets limits on deployment of old missile defenses and testing of new ones, and the White House has often seemed perfectly willing to see the ABM treaty die if it would interfere with Star Wars testing.

The first Pentagon decision of the next Administration should be to accept hibernation for the Strategic Defense Initiative at a budget no higher than $2 billion a year. The next should be to merge negotiations on deep cuts in intercontinental missiles with discussions of changes in the ABM treaty that would permit defense research in both countries--but at a much slower pace than the White House has recently tried to maintain.