European leaders have been muted in their public responses to President Bill Clinton's offer, made in Lisbon last week, to share US missile defence technology with “other civilized nations”. If this offer was meant to help bridge the growing chasm between European and American perceptions of the missile defence issue, it richly deserved to fail.

Reports that the United States has developed a working technology for national missile defence are grossly exaggerated. Sixty billion dollars have been spent since President Ronald Reagan first proposed such a system, but little real progress has been made. Space-based laser weapons and other fantasies have been jettisoned, and the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO) at the Pentagon confines itself to the problem of intercepting a rocket by launching a mechanical interceptor in its path.

Despite this, Reagan's Star Wars fantasy has, since its early days, been accepted by a large part of the US population. People like to believe that American science and technology can solve any problem, and the Star Wars idea was a political success for Reagan. The fact that his vision has been technically discredited, and that tens of billions of dollars were spent with precious little to show for them, hasn't much diminished the political potency of missile defence.

So Reagan's heirs continue to pursue it. In its pursuit, they have even summoned up a category of enemy never previously encountered in the history of warfare — the ‘rogue nation’, whose leaders are not subject to the logic of intimidation. Opinion polls in the United States show a craving for national missile defence, and that many believe it works and even that it is actually already in place.

Last year, Clinton therefore found it politically necessary to declare that he would decide this summer whether to deploy a national missile defence system. The system would be the fruits of the BMDO, which spends 70% of its $3 billion budget on battlefield defences, 20% on national missile defence and just 10% on technology development. Its technology development plan (see http://www.acq.osd.mil/bmdo/bmdolink/html/tech.html) confirms that the Star Wars dreams have been shelved. There is no real research any more, just a clumsy interceptor system that BMDO engineers are struggling to operate.

The first two formal tests of this system have been unsatisfactory: there are convincing allegations, not adequately refuted, that their results were rigged. Scientific experts in the United States have denounced the system as unworkable (see Nature 404, 799 ; 2000). A third test, due next month, will not change that picture. The pressure to deploy now, ahead of November's election, is purely political.

Europe's tactfully restrained response to this unedifying shambles seems appropriate. Clinton's failure to convince Western Europe and Russia to collaborate gives the United States an opportunity to re-examine its rush to deploy a national missile defence system.