San Donaldson, space cadet.

SAM DONALDSON, SPACE CADET 

THE WORLD is being treated to a dazzling display of American technological mastery as our SDI-related Patriot missiles neutralize Iraq's dreaded Scuds. This success should be a cause of great embarrassment to those in the media who have spent years insisting Star Wars technology would never work.

Take ABC's Pentagon correspondent, Bob Zelnick. When urged by a conservative group in March of 1989 to cover former SDI chief James Abrahamson's memo urging development of the system, Zelnick responded: "The day you or anyone else believes that you can influence my coverage by what you decide to parcel out is the day that you have lost touch with reality in more ways than in the strategic system you endorse ... we have more important things to cover than Abe's seat-of-the-pants judgment about a virtually untested technology, which no one is about to deploy in the foreseeable future." That's in line with Zelnick's colleague Ted Koppel, who gave his analysis of SDI on the October 30, 1987, edition of Donahue: "I think that what is being proposed for expenditures on Star Wars, for example, is absolute nonsense."

Time's agenda for America includes the dismantling of SDI in order to fund more worthwhile causes, like a trip to Mars. On July 24, 1989, Time declared that "if the President comes out strongly for the mission [to Mars! Congress should be able to find a way to fund it. One option: siphon the money from Star Wars, and other questionable defense programs." In an August 13, 1990, piece bemoaning investment in SDI, Time reporter Bruce Van Voorst said: "After seven years of research, it is clear that no anti-missile system can provide the impenetrable shield against incoming missiles ... Reagan envisioned in 1983."

Supporters of SDI have regularly been described as daydreamers. In a New York Times column entitled "Pentagon Fantasies" on September 21, 1983, Andrew Cockburn accused the Pentagon of developing "what one senior defense official has described as 'weapons that don't work to meet threats that don't exist.' For example, next year's budget request contains $2 billion for the Divad and Patriot gun and missile air-defense systems, the performance of which is, to put it mildly, disappointing."

On May 13, 1989, the Los Angeles Times presented a story headlined, "New 'Star Wars' Chief: The Right Man for the Job--at the Right Time." The story focused on Air Force Lieutenant General George L. Monahan and the man he replaced, Leiutenant General Abrahamson. Times Pentagon correspondent John Broder described Abrahamson as a "a 'Star Wars' zealot and missionary who sold--some say oversold--the program as a talisman against nuclear holocaust. Monahan, by contrast, modestly describes himself as merely a 'program manager' who says that his job is not to be a promoter for 'Star Wars,' but to run a 'sanity check' on the costly and controversial program." In the January 1, 1990, issue of U.S. News & World Report, senior editor Harrison Rainie charged that "the [Reagan! Administration spun the nation out of torpor with such fantasies as supply-side economics, the nuclear weapons 'window of vulnerability,' and the Strategic Defense Initiative." The Bush Administration was no better, according to Time's Strobe Talbott, who wrote in the February 12, 1990, issue that "the Administration's position in the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) is ... still mired in the past. It is designed to preserve, in its redundant entirety, Ronald Reagan's so-called strategic-modernization program.... The kind of military overinsurance the public was willing to pay for a decade ago looks like wretched excess now."

Last summer, the liberal media were prepared to bury SDI once and for all. When the Senate cut a billion dollars from the SDI program, NBC's Henry Champ gleefully reported that "Senators today finally turned their backs on a dream of the Reagan era." In a June 11 article entitled, "Remember Star Wars? Now it's a Program in Search of a Rationale," U.S. News reporter Bruce Auster opined that "with the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) succumbing to tighter budgets, reduced military tensions, and a dose of technological reality, both the U.S. and the Soviets have an interest in letting Reagan's dream die a quiet death." Later in the article, he wondered, "Can Iraqi missiles save SDI?" This was dimissed because, among other things, "shooting down low-tech missiles in the Middle East may prove as difficult as destroying modern Soviet intercontinental missiles in space." Why? "Ground-based tactical ballistic missile defenses like the U.S. Patriot ... would use radar to track an incoming missile. That poses a dilemma. Larger radars increase effectiveness, but also make an easier target ... Given the technical challenge of shooting down tactical ballistic missiles in combat, are missile defenses worth while?"

In the five-month period between the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the successful launch of the first Patriot, thousands of stories were run by the four major networks, yet only one noted the importance of the SDI missile technology in the coming conflict. Now that the evidence is in, one might expect a more responsible approach to the SDI debate. Don't count on it. At the very moment reporters stationed in Saudi Arabia were being protected by the Patriot missile system, the denunciations of SDI continued, as illustrated by the following January 20 exchange on ABC's This week with David Brinkley:

Sam Donaldson: "Well, we spent billions of dollars for these Star Wars systems, and I haven't seen a Star Wars system in Iraq, George. I haven't seen a B-2 bomber in Iraq."

George Will: "Im' sorry, Sam. When you see a Patriot shooting down an incoming missile, you are seeing strategic defense, and you are seeing Star Wars technology protecting little old you."

Mr. Bozell is the chairman of the Media Research Center.