The end of the 20th century has come and gone, but Reagan's dream of a shield against nuclear weapons lives on. In the eighteen years since, the Pentagon has spent more than $70 billion on missile defense programs without producing a workable system.

The original mission has been whittled down from the ambitious goal of defending the U.S. against the threat posed by thousands of Soviet warheads to the more modest objective of protecting the U.S. from a handful of warheads from North Korea or Iraq. But under George W. Bush, Reagan's dream may get a second chance. Bush has promised to deploy a system capable of defending the entire United States from ballistic missile attack, as well as "our friends and allies and deployed forces overseas."

How is President Bush going to accomplish this? No one is saying, at least not yet. President Bush has talked about developing a layered missile defense system with interceptors on land, at sea, on airplanes, and in outer space, but a detailed explanation of the administration's plans won't be available until Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld completes his military posture review later this year. However, the same kinds of technical problems, cost overruns, and diplomatic obstacles that brought Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative to a halt in the 1980s are likely to derail Bush's equally expansive missile defense vision.

A report released last month by the Pentagon's Office of Independent Testing and Evaluations outlined the daunting challenges facing U.S. missile defense programs. In addition to the land-based National Missile Defense (NMD) system that Bush inherited from the Clinton administration, other programs likely to garner more attention in his administration are the Navy Theater Wide (NTW) system and the Space Based Laser (SBL) program.

For the National Missile Defense system, which failed two out of its' three intercept tests, the report warns that the system is far from ready to intercept the kinds of missiles "currently deployed by the established nuclear powers" - missiles that employ countermeasures and decoys. The report warns that the Navy Theater Wide system, a sea-based system being touted by many proponents as a near-term, "quick and easy" alternative to the NMD system, is not currently a viable option. And the highly touted Space Based Laser is little more than a concept at this stage.

The costs of deploying a missile defense system now will range anywhere from the General Accounting Office's $60 billion estimate for the limited NMD system currently being tested, to $240 billion or more for the multi-layered approach that President Bush seems to support.

Unfortunately, by seeking only military/technical solutions to the missile threat, President Bush is underestimating the consequences for international security of deploying an ambitious NMD system. As the U.S. government's top intelligence analyst on missile proliferation suggested last summer, deployment of an NMD system would set off "an unsettling series of political and military ripple effects . . . that would include a sharp buildup of strategic and medium-range nuclear missiles by China, India, and Pakistan and the further spread of military technology in the Middle East." In essence, an NMD deployment could create the very threats it is supposed to counter.

But there are other ways of dealing with the threat; ways that even Ronald Reagan eventually acknowledged were more effective in protecting us from nuclear weapons. After all, it was Reagan who agreed to eliminate intermediate range nuclear weapons from Europe. He also set the stage for the first major reductions in nuclear weapons under the START I Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.

Instead of pinning all of his hopes on a costly and unproven missile defense program, President Bush should go on the diplomatic offensive to reduce nuclear dangers now. He should start by taking up Russian President Vladimir Putin's offer to reduce U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear warheads to 1,000 or less per side. He should also take the advice of Secretary of State Colin Powell and Korean President Kim Dae Jung by picking up where the Clinton administration left off in the U.S.-North Korean talks on ending Pyonyang's nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs.

Star Wars wasn't the right response during the Cold War, it seems clear that missile defense is not the appropriate response today either. The sooner President Bush realizes this, the sooner he can proceed with a more practical plan for defending us from post-Cold War nuclear threats.

Michelle Ciarrocca and William D. Hartung are Senior Research Associate and President's Fellow, respectively, at the World Policy Institute in New York. They are co-authors of "Tangled Web: The Marketing of Missile Defense."

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