Shooting Down 'Star Wars'

THE MAJORITY accepts the report's view that SDI is not feasible in the forseeable future, but does not advocate abandoning the initiative initially. This is a brutish way to think.

A change in U.S. policy regarding SDI is needed. Needed not because the program is--as can no longer be disputed--infeasible in the short term, but because the terrifying notion of weapons in the sky may become a realilty at some time in the distant future unless we repudiate it in the most emphatic way possible right now.

The physicists' report casts into doubt that decades of research and untold billions of dollars will make SDI what the most rabid in the Administration want it to be: a mechanism to disarm any who oppose the unchecked extension of this country's interests. But decades and billions might see some part of that demented fantasy realized. What we must do is scuttle SDI together with the weapons it is designed to deter. And if others refuse to lay aside their arms together with us, then so be it.