ust last month the Navy began an important series of maneuvers, not in a military theater but in a political one. Admiral Jay Johnson, worried that the other services were in danger of crowding out the Navy in the nation's new antimissile system, signaled that the Navy wanted a piece of the $12.7 billion the Pentagon is expecting to spend in the next six years.
This offensive by the Navy's top officer was a reminder that the dream of constructing a national missile defense, one of the signal ideas of the Reagan years, had not disappeared with the Berlin Wall, the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War. Indeed, the resilience of this notion is an indication that Frances FitzGerald, who uses it as the organizing principle for one of the most imaginative chronicles of Ronald Reagan's presidency, might be on to something important.
FitzGerald, whose Vietnam volume, ''Fire in the Lake,'' won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973, argues in ''Way Out There in the Blue'' that the clearest prism for viewing Reagan isn't Hollywood, isn't middle-class California politics, isn't even the conservative movement. No, the way to understand Reagan is to understand the Strategic Defense Initiative.
The SDI, often referred to as the ''Star Wars'' defense, was a glint in Reagan's eye (and a fantastic vision on the drawing boards of a dozen defense engineers) for more than a year before he won the presidency. It remained with him, and thus with us, through two terms in the White House. But its value to historians may be that it helps to explain Reagan, for it sheds light on his faith in America, his optimism about the nation's capacities, his conviction that the United States would prevail in the arms race, his impulse to seek a technological answer rather than a diplomatic solution to superpower tensions, even his innate generosity (he was willing to share the technology with the Soviets in his own drive for a safer world).
President Clinton's tentative embrace of missile-defense technology last year was so startling because it came in the face of Democrats' and liberals' deep and longstanding skepticism about the possibility of shooting incoming missiles from the sky using other missiles, lasers, and the like; the analogy that repeatedly comes up, in descriptions of the difficulty of mastering this technology, is the challenge of hitting a flying bullet with another flying bullet. FitzGerald herself is amply skeptical of ''Star Wars.''
Even so, it is an article of faith among the conservative faithful that ''Star Wars,''along with the defense buildup that occurred in the Reagan years, drew the Soviet Union into an arms race that broke the back of the Soviet economy and, eventually, the communist bloc itself. It is true that Soviet defense thinkers and diplomats were spooked by SDI. It is true, moreover, that SDI was the biggest bargaining card the Americans held during the Reagan years. FitzGerald attempts to debunk this theory - she argues that military spending loomed so important in the Soviet economy because the rest of the economy grew so weak - but it remains a sturdy part of conservative orthodoxy.
And the idea that fancy high-tech weapons might be the answer to the threat posed by other fancy high-tech weapons has always appealed to the American people, who despite Three Mile Island and the Challenger disaster are drawn to their memories of technological wizardry like the X-15 and Apollo 11 (along with their own experience with such items as the personal computer and video cassette recorder). Nothing's too tough for engineers and scientists, or so the thinking goes. ''When Reagan proposed to make nuclear weapons `impotent and obsolete,' he was running almost no risk of raising public incredulity,'' FitzGerald writes. No one was ever thrown out of office for overestimating the abilities of scientists in lab coats.
Reagan argued that SDI offered ''a way out of our nuclear dilemma, the one that has confounded mankind for four decades,'' but the safety that SDI offered the nation also presented dangers to the world. Any big new technological advance by one superpower inevitably caused new anxieties in the other superpower; thus the fear that ''Star Wars'' would be ''destabilizing.'' By making the United States a little safer against the threat of nuclear attack, ''Star Wars'' ran the potential of making the world a little less safe.
Not that this was such a safe planet at the height of the Cold War, when ''mutual assured destruction'' (known by the irresistible acronym MAD) kept an uneasy peace through an impasse of threats: An attack by one side would bring massive retaliation from the other and so, according to the theory that kept the peace, was unthinkable and unlaunchable.
In the Reagan years, however, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were troubled about the military and moral challenges of MAD and, just as important, were deadlocked on how to proceed with the MX missile, which was encountering heavy weather in Congress. Another important aspect of the political climate at the time: the nuclear-freeze movement, which was the culmination of decades of frustration and fear over the nuclear threat.
In another time, and with another president, the ''Star Wars'' idea might never have taken hold. But Reagan was a former actor with a remarkable memory for stray lines from screenplays, and in the movie ''Torn Curtain'' there was a reference to making missiles ''obsolete.'' That apparently stuck with Reagan. ''He was following a train of thought - or simply a trail of applause lines - from one reassuring speech to another and then appropriating a dramatic phrase, whose origin he may or may not have remembered, for his peroration,'' FitzGerald writes.
But ''Star Wars'' had its star turn on the world stage at the Reykjavik summit with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1986. In the 14 years that have passed, Reykjavik has taken on an almost mythic quality, standing as a symbol for conservative thinkers of Reagan's resolve and his determination to win the Cold War. There, in Iceland, the two superpower leaders discussed actually scrapping all ballistic missiles by 1996 - a year when, it turned out, the Soviet Union would no longer exist. But Reagan refused to trade away SDI, the deal collapsed, and establishment defense thinkers and politicians were in an uproar over the president's apparent willingness to eliminate land- and sea-based ballistic missiles.
SDI eventually lost its power to traumatize Gorbachev and Soviet military planners, but it has not disappeared from politics - or from the imagination of humankind. It persists, and last spring the Clinton administration publicly called for establishing a missile-defense system as soon as technically feasible. It remains one of the great quests and great questions of politics and diplomacy - and one of the stubborn elements of the legacy of that most beguiling figure of the last quarter of the 20th century: Ronald Reagan, founding father of missile defense.
