The Great Star Wars P.R. War

By Richard Stengel

The first strike was launched in October. The missile was a 30-second television commercial showing a childlike drawing of stick figures, a simple house and a glum-faced sun. A Little Miss Muffet voice chirps, "I asked my daddy what this Star Wars stuff is all about. He said that right now we can't protect ourselves from nuclear weapons, and that's why the President wants to build a Peace Shield." Chunky red missiles begin to rain down, but they harmlessly disintegrate (pop! pop!) when they hit a bluish , Crayola arc in the sky. Presto, the arc becomes a shimmering rainbow, and the frowning sun begins to smile.

A counterstrike swiftly followed. The competing commercial showed a small carrottop boy playing with wooden alphabet blocks that spell Star Wars; he is vainly trying to arrange them to spell Peace Shield. A portentous voice intones, "Matthew's learning what adults already know: when someone wants to mislead you, they try to change the name." Then, an epiphany: "I got it!" Matthew says. "Space Wars."

The "rainbow" ad, sponsored by the pro-Star Wars lobbying group High Frontier, peppered the Washington airwaves as the President was preparing to leave for the Geneva summit. The "building blocks" commercial, hastily put together for the Committee for a Strong Peaceful America by Democratic Media Merlin Robert Squier, was created to deflect the impact of the first ad. These two commercials are merely the first and most publicized round in the great Star Wars Public Relations War, a duel of imagery that is bound to escalate even faster than the arms race.

As the U.S. and the Soviet Union fence over the implications of the space-based defenses at the arms-control talks in Geneva, proponents and opponents of Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative are vying for the allegiance of the American public. On college campuses and television screens, in board rooms and scientific symposiums, the two sides are intent on persuading Americans that Star Wars is either a) an impossible and dangerous dream or b) the ultimate nuclear umbrella. Declares retired General Daniel Graham, head of High Frontier: "Both sides realize it's a political issue and grass-roots support is very important." Obscured by the often kindergartenish imagery, however, the real debate over SDI remains murky and complex.

High Frontier is the most conspicuous and conservative of the outfits lobbying for SDI. Graham says that this year his organization spent half of its $3 million budget on pro-SDI ads in print and on television, and forecasts a budget of $5 million for next year. The group publishes a newsletter with a circulation of more than 60,000. Graham zigzags across the country blithely suggesting that the U.S. could build SDI (he loathes the term Star Wars) with today's off-the-shelf technology. While Graham may be the most zealous of the pro-SDi salesmen, he is an amateur compared with its leading pitchman, Ronald Reagan. The pro-SDI forces count on the President's uncanny ability to convince the public that good old American hard work and know-how can make any dream come true.

Slow off the mark, the anti-SDI forces are racing to catch up. In Washington every Thursday at 1 p.m., the Space Policy Working Group, which includes representatives of the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Council for a Livable World and other anti-SDI groups, meets to plot countermoves. Two anti-SDI groups, the Arms Control Association and the Committee for National Security, recently received a $1 million grant from Actor Paul Newman (financed in part by his sales of Newman's Own salad dressing) to set up a program to educate journalists about arms control, especially the evils of Star Wars.

The newest player in the p.r. contest is a group with a vaguely mysterious name, the Trilogy Foundation. Trilogy, which has the blessing of the White House and the National Security Council, was the brainchild of a group that included David Jones, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and former U.S. Senator and Astronaut Harrison Schmitt. According to Washington P.R. Man Burt Hoffman, who is helping the group organize, Trilogy intends to inform the public about the technical merits of SDI. "The object is to stay in the middle, not to be like High Frontier, which has been labeled as zealots, or the Union of Concerned Scientists, who have also been labeled as zealots," says he.

At the moment, SDI is still more theory than hardware, and has yet to attract the hordes of high-tech defense lobbyists bred by other weapons systems. But as Star Wars evolves, the usual suspects will no doubt hungrily line up at what Democratic Congressman Norman Dicks of Washington calls a "space barrel." With some estimates of the cost of building SDI ranging up to a trillion dollars, Star Wars could prove to be the most capacious pork barrel of all time. So far, SDI research has been funded to the tune of $2.385 billion ($1.397 billion in the past year), spread among 20 large and 200 small companies and a dozen universities. While this is mere microchips to the better than $100 billion-a-year defense industry, SDI already has something in common with more entrenched systems: by one account, three-fourths of all prime contracts in space defense work awarded since 1983 have gone to states or districts represented by members of the House and Senate Armed Services committees and Defense Appropriations subcommittees.

On college campuses, the Star Wars debate is turning into a high-tech version of the 1960s protests over weapons development and classified research. A group called United Campuses to Prevent Nuclear War has circulated a petition asking scientists not to accept any Government funds for SDI research. Some 2,100 have signed the pledge, many from Cornell, Caltech and M.I.T. They contend that Star Wars research is high-tech hocus-pocus that will escalate the arms race. Some scientists suggest that because the protest has been centered at elite universities, SDI research is being done at less prestigious places. Huffs Princeton's Nobel Physicist Philip Anderson: "People who are hungry and need funding are going to lap up the money. They're out there, people from East Podunk Univerity, while the first-raters are signing the pledge."

The baby-talking commercials and the simplistic Astrodome-vs.-Armageddon rhetoric give an illusion of clarity to what is still an arcane subject. "The quality of the debate hasn't been very good," says Democrat Dicks. For their part, the anti-SDI forces say they welcome complexity. "If you oversimplify Star Wars, it sounds terrific," says Squier. "The more they explain it, the worse it sounds."

Supporters of SDI do not quite agree about what it is actually supposed to do. Is it meant to be a "perfect defense" or is it designed to "enhance deterrence"? President Reagan and High Frontier's Graham seem to suggest that Star Wars can render nuclear missiles obsolete by providing a foolproof shield. Rather than continuing to base security on the doctrine of mutual assured destruction, Reagan likes to say, why not aim for a world in which neither side has the capacity to destroy the other? When pressed, most proponents of SDI acknowledge that perfection is probably a pipe dream, and show no intention of scrapping the nuclear stockpile. Rather, they conceive of a system that will greatly increase the Soviets' uncertainty about whether a first strike would disarm the U.S. SDI thus becomes an adjunct to nuclear deterrence rather than a replacement.

In between the true believers and the naysayers are many who regard SDI as a strategy that has yanked the Soviets back to the bargaining table by exploiting their greatest fear: that Uncle Sam will pull a technological rabbit out of his top hat. Some see Star Wars as the ultimate bargaining chip, to be traded away for sizable reductions in offensive weapons. Others want to take the cautious path of continuing research to see if a space shield is feasible before deciding whether to build it or negotiate with it.

The Administration argues that the tough decisions on Star Wars are still years and years away. Not until research is completed in the early 1990s, they say, will Congress have to vote on billions in SDI budget requests, or junk the project. But that relaxed timetable could be disrupted by an enticing Soviet arms-control offer or a massive Soviet buildup. Ultimately, of course, the choice will be a political one. But perhaps by then the public discussion of SDI will have moved beyond rainbows and building blocks. --By Richard Stengel. Reported by Jay Branegan and Michael Duffy/Washington

With reporting by Reported by Jay Branegan, Michael Duffy/Washington