Richard Reeves, Yahoo

I’m sure it is just coincidence that the sixth “Star Wars” film is opening across Europe at the same time the U.S. Air Force is once again talking about surrounding the planet with space weapons. Haven’t we seen this movie before?

Take this headline: “Physicists Express ‘Stars Wars’ Doubt; Long Delays Seen.” That was on the front page of The New York Times — on April 23, 1987. The story below reported that an American Physical Society study of the feasibility of the Strategic Defense Initiative estimated that it would take more than 10 years to determine whether it would be possible to do the research to see if research of the weaponry involved was possible.

That report came four years after President Ronald Reagan announced SDI on March 23, 1983. It was, he said, “his dream,” a defensive shield to protect the United States from attack by nuclear missiles. Its opponents used the name “Star Wars” from the first episodes of the science fiction epic to mock the idea, which some of them traced back to 1940. That was the year that actor Ronald Reagan played Brass Bancroft in “Murder in the Air,” a movie about a magic machine that protected the United States from air attack.

Wherever it came from, his own secretary of state, George Shultz, privately called it “lunacy.” Perhaps. But SDI, feasible or not, played a significant part in ending the Cold War. “The perfect bargaining chip,” said former President Richard Nixon at the time, because the idea was better than the scientific prospects. Talk of the thing brought the Soviets into arms reduction talks and treaties. A new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, trying to manage a stagnant economy and restless communist allies, believed that his country had to match American advances — and knew his country could not afford the expenditures required.

But Reagan was not bargaining. He believed in the thing. He considered offensive nuclear weapons “immoral” and thought it was just as immoral not to try to find a way to make them obsolete. The idea of SDI has since survived hundreds of bad reports and bad tests. The idea, of course, was to protect us from Gorbachev’s Soviet Union, which no longer exists. President Bill Clinton tried to stop the program, but he failed. The cost, over the past 22 years, has been more than $100 billion.

Gorbachev argued, among other things, that there was no such thing as defensive research. Weapons are weapons, he said, and Reagan or one of his successors would turn to offensive weapons in space. Reagan, a true romantic, said no American would ever do such a thing, and he offered to give the Soviets whatever defensive technology we developed.

Gorbachev laughed. “The U.S. has money and could do things the Soviets could not,” he said. “Excuse me, Mr. President, but I cannot take your idea of sharing SDI seriously. You are not willing to share with us oil-well equipment, digitally guided machine tools, or even milking machines. Sharing SDI would provoke a second American revolution! Let’s be realistic …”

Gorbachev turned out to be right, not about the future of communism but about Americans and weapons. If reports from Washington this week are true, a new president, George W. Bush, is inclined to go ahead with the Air Force’s ideas for research, and maybe even development and deployment, of offensive weapons in space. The idea called “Global Strike” would, they say, make it possible for the United States to strike with precision any acre of the planet in less than 45 minutes. I doubt that, but the Air Force says it does not.

“We must establish and maintain space superiority,” says Gen. Lance Lord. That’s a name to be reckoned with, even better than Brass Bancroft. “Simply put, it’s the American way of fighting.”

It is? Well, it’s also the American way of scaring the world into hating us. And it is also the American way of scaring ourselves into spending more than a trillion dollars, one estimate of the cost, to protect ourselves from millions of new enemies.