Star Wars Under Fire

Weapons change purposes these days as easily as people change hats. But rumblings from the Pentagon indicate that even the latest version of Star Wars is in trouble. The first tremor came in a May 15 memo by Assistant Secretary of Defense David Chu leaked to the press last week. Haste could make billions of dollars in waste, warned Chu. The department's top weapons analyst says plans to deploy 100 ground-based interceptors by 1997 -- rather than 2002, as he recommends -- to fend off small-scale nuclear attacks cannot proceed without major cost overruns and performance problems. In the rush to deploy, he says, the military will have to design and start buying SDI before any of the missiles, radar or communications involved are tested. That is hardly a recipe for success: the record of earlier ground-interceptor tests has been ; spotty at best. The proposal, says Chu, violates the fly-before-buy principles that Pentagon leaders "have labored so hard to put into place." At week's end the Pentagon bowed to that logic and announced that it was pushing back the SDI plan by at least a year.

What's the rush? Last year Congress ordered speedy deployment of the 100- missile complex at Grand Forks, N. Dak., the only strategic-defense site permitted by the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty. If that agreement can be renegotiated with the Russians, congressional SDI-niks hope to expand Grand Forks into a $35 billion nationwide network of 700 interceptors. But a second leak last week could chill those plans: a draft Pentagon report now concludes that even the proposed national-defense site at Grand Forks would violate the ABM treaty. And that, says Federation of American Scientists space policy director John Pike, is what all the urgency is really about. "They're trying to get rid of the ABM treaty before the magic of Desert Storm fades," observes Pike. "They'll work out the bugs later. But it's a very expensive form of diplomacy."