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I hate to say I told you so. But, well, I did.

Now politicians and pundits from Tokyo to Toledo are hoping we can shoot down North Korea's ballistic missiles. The concept of missile defense is suddenly a hot topic once again.

North Korean dictator Kim Jung Il is test-firing missiles and daring us to do something about it. President Bush looks grim. The Japanese are rightly upset. The United Nations, as usual, is dithering.

President Ronald Reagan started the Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983. If we had pushed hard on missile defense over the past 23 years we'd have a defensive system up and working today, and threats from North Korea or anywhere else would be pointless.

But lack of political will, more than technological obstacles, have delayed our missile defense work unconscionably.

When SDI was first proposed, Reagan's opponents dismissed the idea as"Star Wars," a wild fantasy proposed by an aged former movie actor and backed by Cold War hard-liners such as the late Edward Teller.

Scientists who had only an academic understanding of the concept made pronouncements that missile defenses could never work. Media pundits picked up their opinions and repeated them as revealed truths.

The Soviet Union has more than 10,000 nuclear-tipped missiles, they pointed out. You can't shoot them all down. Even if only a few get through the nuclear devastation would destroy America.

They conveniently overlooked the fact that without a defense, all 10,000 of those missiles would hit America. Besides, the SDI defensive shield was intended to deter the Soviets from launching a missile attack on us, not to invite them.

And it worked. The Soviet military quietly gave up its quest for missile superiority over the United States. The mere possibility of SDI made them throw in the towel. When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in Moscow the military did not oppose his reforms. Within a few years the Soviet Union collapsed.

Okay, said the politicians and pundits, we don't need a missile defense system now; the Cold War is over.

But while we slowed down research on missile defenses the rest of the world was busily acquiring missiles: buying them from China and North Korea, or developing their own. Most disquieting of all, nations such as Iraq and Iran in the unstable Middle East were building up missile arsenals.

Washington wasn't too worried about that. Our diplomats talked about the danger of "rogue nations" acquiring long-range missiles and weapons of mass destruction, but talk was all we did. After all, Iraqi missiles were little more than old Soviet Scuds: short-range battlefield missiles, no threat to the U.S.

Iran was developing missiles with the range to hit much of Europe. The Europeans didn't seem worried about it. Not then.

The came the Gulf War of 1991. While the Iraqi army collapsed under the tremendous onslaught of American air power, Saddam Hussein launched Scuds toward Israel and into Saudi Arabia. The U.S. replied with a makeshift defensive missile, the Patriot.

The Patriot was more of a propaganda success than a tactical one. It didn't work very well against the Scuds, and opponents of missile defense crowed that the defense didn't work.

But the Scuds did. One of them hit a U.S. Army barracks in Saudi Arabia and killed more soldiers than the entire Iraqi army managed to do.

It was clear that we needed a defense against battlefield missiles, and the Department of Defense pushed for such defenses while our diplomatic efforts were focused on "non-proliferation:" trying to talk the other nations of the world into giving up their plans for building missiles and weapons of mass destruction.

Now we have Iran armed with missiles that can hit Rome and working to develop nuclear weapons. Now we have North Korea flight-testing missiles that can span the Pacific Ocean and strike the United States.

And they are pushing for nuclear weapons, too.

We have a first-generation missile defense system deployed in Alaska that may or may nor be able to shoot down North Korean missiles heading our way. I wish we had something better.

One of the long-lasting arguments against missile defense is that the technology costs too much. When Reagan first proposed SDI, opponents said it would cost a trillion dollars or more. That's an incredibly inflated figure, but let's use it for the sake of argument.

A trillion dollars to create a shield that will protect American cities against nuclear attack by long-range missiles.

How much is an American city worth? The real estate value of a small city such as Naples must be considerably more than a billion dollars.

How much is Honolulu worth? Or San Francisco? Or Washington? You have to balance the cost against the benefit.

Moreover, if we had a credible missile defense system in place, it would discourage tinpot dictators such as Kim Jung Il from trying to develop missiles. It would be like trying to develop a cavalry corps in the face of machine guns.

Perhaps the real threat against American cities is a nuclear weapon smuggled in by terrorists. But nations such as North Korea and Iran are using missiles to achieve political power. In the long run, we cannot prevent them from building those missiles and the nuclear warheads for them, short of military action against them.

How much better would it be to face them with a working defense system that would, in President Reagan's words, make their missiles "impotent and obsolete." We have the technology. But we're running short on time.

Naples resident Ben Bova is the author of more than 110 books, including "Star Peace," a non-fiction assessment of missile defense technology and politics. Dr. Bova's Web site address is www.benbova.com.