Star Wars Arrives in Alaska Moose Country

The sun barely sets at this time of year in northern Alaska but yesterday morning it rose on a ceremony that will take its place in the history of nuclear weaponry. Behind the heavily fortified gates of Fort Greely, a brief ground-breaking ceremony marked the start of construction of a new missile defence system project and the end of a 30-year-long anti-ballistic missile treaty.

For President George Bush, the event is the fulfilment of an election-year promise to back the Star Wars programme, designed to provide defence for the US against long-range ballistic missiles. Congress has approved $7.8 billion for the project. For opponents of the scheme, the ceremony, held in front of political and military dignitaries and within sight of the snow-capped Alaska Range, is an ominous step towards escalation of the nuclear arms race.

The construction of what is officially known as the Ground-based Midcourse Defence (GMD) Test Bed and US withdrawal from the ABM was justified last week by Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz in the Wall Street Journal . 'We are now free to develop, test and deploy effective defences against missile attacks from states like North Korea and Iran - states that are aggressively seeking weapons of mass destruction and long- range missiles,' he wrote. 'We will not allow the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most dangerous weapons.'

The bucolic setting at Fort Greely, where road signs warn of mooses crossing and roadside taverns offer buffalo burgers, seems a million miles from the realities of what is intended to be the world's most sophisticated nuclear warfare project. The Fairbanks-based group No Nukes North has set up a protest camp nearby. While some passing drivers gesture abusively, the reaction of locals, who broadly welcome the project because of the jobs it will bring and the area's historic ties with the military, has not been overly hostile.

Jacqui Goss, one of a group of students from the University of Alaska at Fairbanks who had come to support the peace camp, said: 'I wanted to show my opposition to spending all this money instead of improving relations with other countries.'

Richard Heacock, a retired Methodist pastor who joined the caravan, described the project as 'a gross waste of our national wealth', while Stacy Studebaker, a retired science teacher from Kodiak Island, said: 'It has been very difficult to get people to wake up to the fact of what this really means.'

But the protesters are a minority. Rod Boyce, news editor at the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, said: 'It's a Republican state and the President is very popular up here. This is a military town and I don't think people have a problem with it.'

In Delta Junction, too, the ground-breaking was greeted warmly. Al Gartz, a former military man who runs the petrol station and liquor store, said: 'This town has been dead for two years. This means business.'

Denise Williams, a waitress in the Buffalo Centre Diner, was unconcerned that the area might now become a target: 'I'd rather be here than in Fairbanks because it'll be instant - we'll never know.' Young people in the town yesterday were hopeful the project would mean jobs and the arrival of facilities, like a cinema and a bowling alley.

The Pentagon's Missile Defence Agency is to classify as secret details of targets in all future flight intercept tests of the system. The Pentagon argues that to expose the results to public scrutiny is to aid the enemy. Sceptics say the decision protects the programme from proper critical evaluation.