Star Wars forever.

Star Wars is back. When a special government commission headed by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced in July that Iran, Iraq, or North Korea could launch a nuclear missile against the United States within five years, the fantasy of a nuclear-missile defense system quickly reappeared.

This wildly expensive, technologically dubious, and militarily destabilizing plan received a boost from Republican leaders in Congress and the conservative pundit gallery. Fifteen years after Ronald Reagan launched the program, we've spent $55 billion on Star Wars, and have nothing to show for it--except the transfer of our money to Pentagon contractors. Ironically, just days before the commission's report, the Pentagon scolded Lockheed Martin for failing five times in a row to intercept missiles in its test program--the latest in a long line of failures.

The Republicans want to spend tens of billions of dollars more on this technological quick fix, even though the Pentagon has all but given up on the idea that it can build a comprehensive umbrella against all incoming nuclear weapons. Star Wars has been downgraded. Most of the research now goes toward "theater defense"--protecting U.S. troops or U.S. allies overseas.

Now we are hearing about the threat from the so-called rogue states. But this threat may be exaggerated.

"The only people who need to be alarmed about the Rumsfeld report are U.S. taxpayers," according to William Hartung of the World Policy Institute and Gary Ferdman of Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities, who wrote a recent newspaper column on the subject. "It is the latest attempt by the Star Wars lobby to scare us to death over a threat that doesn't exist."

Hartung and Ferdman point out that Iraq's nuclear program has been ground down by U.N. inspections. North Korea hasn't tested a missile in five years, and Iran, though it has a missile that can reach as far as Israel, is years away from building a bomb that could be loaded onto the missile.

"There's no conceivable threat for us to spend the money on," agrees Michael Klare, author of Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws. "They're not going to have missiles that can reach the United States."

But even if the threat were as imminent as the Rumsfeld report indicates, Star Wars would not be the answer. "Any country that could develop a long-range missile could also deploy a variety of simple counter-measures that would make the job of the defense much more difficult if not impossible," Technology Review pointed out in its May/June 1997 issue.

Star Wars could have some other serious unintended, but predictable, consequences.

Russia would not look favorably on U.S. nuclear defenses. These defenses would violate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Moscow and would give it no incentive to go through with reducing its stockpile. As a result, "the United States and Russia [could] become locked in at high levels of deployed weapons, while retaining their ability to build more," Technology Review says.

China could also be expected to react in a negative way. "To preserve its nuclear deterrent, China, like Russia, could build up its nuclear forces or adopt a launch-on-warning posture," argues Technology Review. Either one would make the United States less secure.

Instead of relying on exorbitant technological mirages, the United States could use diplomacy to greatly reduce the nuclear risk. North Korea has "recently hinted that it might be willing to get rid of its existing missiles as part of a comprehensive security bargain on the Korean peninsula," Hartung and Ferdman write. Washington should take North Korea up on the bargain and offer similar incentives to Iran and Iraq.

Klare believes the main nuclear threat against the United States is from an unauthorized or accidental nuclear launch by Russia. "But the answer to that is through arms control," he says. "For one-one-thousandth of the expense of Star Wars, we could be accelerating the decommissioning of Russian missiles," as well as buying up the missiles of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea.

Instead, the Republicans are trying to scare the I American people into approving another dangerous I round in the nuclear arms race. After five decades, it should be clear by now that the road to survival in the nuclear age is not through some unilateral technological quick fix. Technological advances are ephemeral and destabilizing. Security in the nuclear age can come only through diplomacy, rigorous international inspections, and disarmament.