It’s been 16 years since President Ronald Reagan gave birth to “Star Wars,” the program to build a massive defense of the United States against nuclear attack. Even the parents of the most difficult teen-ager cannot imagine such an acquisitive, uncooperative child.

Nearly $50 billion has been spent. The scope has been scaled back from an all-protecting space-based umbrella over the entire nation to protecting just major cities to protecting just missile silos to maybe deflecting the occassional stray missile fired by mistake.

“Hitting a bullet with a bullet” is proving to be every bit as hard as the experts predicted. The test record for hit-to-kill interceptors is poor — only a 24-percent success rate overall, dropping to less than 10 percent at high altitude, where incoming warheads must be met.

Yet despite the clear need for better technology and much better test results (so say the Joint Chiefs and the Defense Department’s Ballistic Missile Defense Organization), Congress is rushing headlong, past just accelerating research and development and into actual deployment.

In the Senate, a bill to deploy “as soon as technologically feasible” seems certain to pass, with no strings attached regarding success rates or cost. The House is even less patient and certainly less willing to go into the 2000 election as being in favor of incinerated American children. By a vote of 50-3, it’s Armed Services Committee on Thursday approved a vague 15-word bill to make deployment “a national goal,” again with no performance criteria, no price cap.

One of those lonely three was Maine Rep. Tom Allen. His numerous, good reasons can be distilled to this: the 15 words are but “a hollow, empty promise.”

Rep. Allen correctly says Congress must not commit to spending more than the $6.6 billion already planned for the next five years on missile defense until it figures out how it will pay for its other top priority of increasing military pay and benefits by $4.8 billion. It must not shift the focus to trying to protect an entire nation against intercontinental ballistic missiles when it still cannot protect troops in the field from short-range tactical missiles. It must not forget that just a few months ago the consensus in Congress was that the greatest threat to Americans at home won’t be delivered by rocket but by a terrorist’s suitcase or panel truck.

Yet members of both parties seem determined to make deploying a system that does not work an election litmus test. The feeling seems to be that it’s not technology holding comprehensive missile defense back, it’s a lack of political will. Not so, says Rep. Allen: “It’s physics. It’s money. It’s the real world.” Congress should join him in it.