SDI, R I P.

ON MAY 13, Secretary of Defense Les Aspin made a surprise appearance at the Pentagon briefing room. His purpose? To announce the Clinton Administration's decision to gut the Strategic Defense Initiative. The decision, Aspin derisively declared, marks "the end of the Star Wars era." After nearly a decade of research--and a $38-billion national investment--America's chance to build a space-based shield against nuclear attack in the foreseeable future is now dead.

SDI died a quiet death. The GOP's silence was deafening. Some conservatives, like Ken Adelman, praised SDI's role in the defeat of Communism. Few, however--including few congressional Republicans--rose to challenge the decision, or to point out the tragedy it poses for the future of American national security.

In fact, the strongest reaction came from former President Ronald Reagan, speaking to graduates at The Citadel a few days after the Aspin announcement. "The [Democrats] have been all too eager to denounce this program for years, and they have been proven wrong time and time again," Reagan said.

At his press conference, Aspin had stated that SDI was no longer needed because the nuclear threat to the United States "has receded to the vanishing point." President Reagan challenged this rationale directly: "If the new Administration thinks we are no longer at risk, they need to open their eyes and take a good hard look at the world."

He is right. Consider only a few recent revelations about the post-Cold War world:

--The power struggle in Russia showed how unstable Russia's new democracy still is--and threatened to place the former Soviet Union's massive nuclear arsenal in the hands of potentially authoritarian rulers with uncertain intentions.

---A report in The New Yorker detailed how, just three years ago, India and Pakistan were on the verge of actually waging a regional nuclear war.

--North Korea threatened to withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, indicating that the Stalinist Pyongyang regime may be very close to assembling nuclear weapons.

--An increasingly unstable South Africa revealed that, during the 1980s, it had actually assembled six nuclear weapons, without the assistance of Western scientists or the knowledge of Western intelligence.

Clearly the greatest emerging threat to American national security lies in the proliferation of nuclear weapons. At a recent Senate hearing, Major General Malcolm O'Neill, acting director of the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO), underscored this danger.

O'Neill told the Defense Appropriations subcommittee that the nuclear threat from the Third World is growing: "Some 25 nations, many of them hostile to the United States, may possess or be developing" missile systems capable of delivering chemical, biological, and nuclear warheads. "the trend," he argued, "is in the direction of... increasing range, lethality, and sophistication."

To grasp the scope of the problem, one needs only to imagine what could have happened if Saddam Hussein had possessed, not limited-range SCUD missiles, but one or two Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs). Thus armed, Saddam could have held the international community hostage.

And yet the Clinton Administration has reacted to the spread of advanced weaponry among dozens of small nations by reverting to a policy that was (arguably) appropriate when our concern was a single massively armed adversary with a First Strike scenario. Secretary Aspin announced last week that the SDIO has been renamed the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO)---the name the program had before President Reagan announced his intention to pursue space-based defenses in 1983. This is more than a symbolic change. The purpose of BMDO was to protect our missiles, ensuring that they could survive a Soviet first strike. President Reagan's innovation was to shift the focus from protecting America indirectly by protecting our missiles, to protecting civilian populations directly.

By changing back to the old BMDO, we have presumably abandoned this goal of protecting civilian population centers. But the emerging nuclear threat is not to our missile silos. It lies in the possibility of a nuclear-armed tyrant threatening New York or Boston with a limited nuclear attack. The "new" BMDO is not designed to protect against this eventuality.

Secretary Aspin claims that there has been no cut in SDI spending. This is simply not true. In its 1994 Defense budget, released in April, the Administration had already cut the 1994 allocation for the SDIO by $2.5 billion-- an immediate reduction of nearly 40 per cent from the Bush Administration's proposed budget for Strategic Defense. And the Administration has stated its intention to cut more than $10 billion from the program's budget by 1999.

Space-based defenses and sensors have been, for all intents and purposes, eliminated. Among the projects dramatically cut, or terminated entirely, are: the much-heralded "Brilliant Pebbles" missile interceptor, designed to intercept and destroy missiles while still in space; "Brilliant Eyes" satellites, designed to locate and identify incoming missiles; and a variety of programs designed to develop directed-energy-or laser--technology.

What's left? The Clinton Administration has shifted the focus of the program away from a space-based national missile defense and toward "theater defenses"---systems that are designed to defend combat troops from tactical, or battlefield, missile attack. The extent of the Administration's initiative to deal with the emerging nuclear threat seems to be directing $400 million in the 1994 budget for dismantling the former Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal.

The irony of the Clinton cuts is that SDI would be particularly well suited to the post-Cold War era. Technology originally conceived to defend against 30,000 Soviet missiles certainly could be harnessed to provide an effective defense against a handful of ICBMs from a Third World nuclear tyrant. And the very existence of such a defense could deter a small power from ever playing its nuclear card in a showdown with the United States.

Senator Jim Sasser (D., Tenn.), responding to Major General O'Neill's testimony, dismissed such concerns, stating: "When you walk down the streets of this city you'll find that most people are less concerned about Saddam Hussein and any other dictator than they are of somebody pushing a .45 up in their stomach and blowing a hole in it." Sadly, few congressional Republicans seem interested in taking on this sort of short-sightedness. But if the GOP won't defend SDI, who will?

In his commencement speech, President Reagan told the graduates at The Citadel how imperative it is to save the Strategic Defense Initiative. "I may not be a Rhodes Scholar," Reagan said, "but I do know one thing: If we can protect America with a defensive shield from incoming missiles, we should by all means do so." This simple logic seems to be lost on President Clinton. And as his Administration prepares to leave America strategically naked against the emerging nuclear threat, Reagan and O'Neill seem to be the only ones speaking out. They could use a little help.

Mr. Weber, the former congressman from Minnesota. is co-founder of the new conservative group Empower America.