Fourteen years later, though Russia is no longer a remotely conceivable enemy, missile defense is still what an American president wants to do. Vladimir Putin described President Bush's decision to withdraw from the anti-ballistic missile treaty as a mistake, but one that need not affect "the spirit of partnership and indeed alliance" between America and Russia. And here we can catch an echo of Gorbachev's resigned acceptance of a development he saw as both irrational and unstoppable.

Gorbachev understood that the American preoccupation with missile defense was deeply contradictory. Even if Star Wars weapons which could bring down incoming missiles could eventually be produced, they could never have offered protection to the whole American population. When politicians occasionally uttered this truth in the Reagan years, there was usually controversy. In the minds of ordinary Americans, the system was worth pursuing because it would directly protect all or most of the people, not because it could protect some American weapons, ensure the survival of a fractionally larger proportion of civilians in a nuclear attack or otherwise complicate the task of an aggressor. Nor were ordinary Americans much enthused by the only partially concealed ambitions of some on the Republican right to use this supposedly defensive program ultimately to create an American offensive capacity in space.

Reagan himself seemed to have often thought of the strategic defense initiative, and certainly he often spoke of it, as if a perfect defense for the whole population were the aim. But, with hardly any exceptions, the experts in America, Russia, and other countries agreed that missile defenses could neither provide an umbrella for the whole population nor constitute an insurmountable obstacle to a major adversary. From the beginning the Star Wars concept, ambiguously embracing both defensive and offensive ambitions, based on weapons that did not exist and on possibilities that were almost certainly not fully realizable, has had this elusive, fictional quality.

The way in which missile defense survived the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war can only be fully explained by its talismanic importance to American conservatives. In her fascinating book on Reagan and SDI, Frances Fitzgerald writes in her chapter on SDI after Reagan that "the persistence of the push for deployment was in many ways phenomenal". The USSR was gone, defense spending was falling, public interest had almost completely disappeared and the technological breakthroughs which had been promised had stubbornly failed to materialize. Yet missile defense lived on, sustained by the initially less than enthusiastic administration of George Bush Sr and then by a reluctant Clinton, finally to be reinstated as a key policy by the younger Bush and his people.

Events wrote American missile defense a fresh script with new practical, popular and political plot lines. Missile defense made somewhat more sense, technically, if the problem was accidental launch, a single weapon in the hands of terrorists or if the adversary envisaged was not a big nuclear power like Russia or even China but a small state with only a handful of unsophisticated weapons.

A system that could bring down one, two or a few missiles could just about be envisaged, even if complete success could hardly be guaranteed. The popular perception of the program combined an understanding that this lesser task was more feasible with an exaggerated belief in American military science.

The apparent success of Patriot missiles in bringing down Scuds aimed at Israel and Saudi Arabia during the Gulf war was followed by a spurt in public interest and faith in missile defense The Patriots were in fact a failure, as studies after the war showed, and in any case represented old technology not relevant to Star Wars tasks. Even so, the impact of smart weapons of various kinds on American popular consciousness through the 1990s was probably to reinforce the argument that the missile defense program's objectives could be reached, if enough money and scientific talent were invested.

But the most important development was political. The record shows that American conservatives had in fact diverse opinions on missile defense, both during the Reagan years and afterward. There were those who thought it technically impossible, foolish or at least a diversion from more pressing defense needs. In Reagan's final period, when he combined his faith in Star Wars with an apparent readiness to bargain away American strategic weapons and an affectionate public attitude to Gorbachev, some on the right thought that combination damaging to the national interest. George Bush Sr's administration included a number of skeptics, and there are members of the present Bush administration, other than Colin Powell, who had their doubts.

But somewhere along the way missile defense became a critical issue for Republicans. Newt Gingrich, the leading figure in the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 made it part of his contract with America. Senator Bob Dole later ran for the presidency with missile defense as one of his main planks. He had not previously been a great enthusiast, but as Frankie Fitzgerald explains, the belief was that this was an issue that would define him against Clinton while not involving the vote-losing potential of other conservative obsessions like banning abortion or repealing gun control laws. Laurence Korb, of the Council on Foreign Relations, recently called missile defense"an end in itself" for Republicans, and "a litmus test of loyalty to the Reagan legacy".

The consequences of American Republicans lighting on this issue as a device for creating and compelling unity are now with us in the shape of the abandonment of the ABM treaty. That the prospects for controlling weapons of mass destruction have been damaged as a result is obvious, how seriously remains to be seen.

Other kinds of damage may already have been done. Richard Rhodes, reviewing a recent volume of memoirs by Edward Teller, who went on from the hydrogen bomb to become a leading advocate of missile defense, puts a pertinent question. "It remains to be determined how much responsibility the missile defense mandarins bear for the nation's lack of protection against terrorist attacks, how much their glamorous and expensive hi-tech visions distracted our leaders from practical home defenses"

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001

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