REAGAN'S STAR WARS BID: MANY IDEAS CONVERGING

In January 1982, Dr. Edward Teller, a physicist who played a central role in developing the hydrogen bomb, met with President Reagan to discuss new ways of trying to destroy enemy missiles and warheads during an attack.

It was the first of four meetings Dr. Teller would have with the President before the ''Star Wars'' speech of March 23, 1983. In that address Mr. Reagan called on American scientists to find ways of rendering nuclear weapons ''impotent and obsolete.''

No one - perhaps not even Mr. Reagan - can definitively list all the factors that ultimately prompted him to make his speech. Dr. Teller's counsel over the course of a year may have played a role. But so did the suggestions of key confidants, his science adviser, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the National Security Council. Indeed, a confluence of people and ideas, of forces and counterforces, lay behind the speech, and a review of that history goes a long way toward illuminating the origins of the Strategic Defense Initiative, as it is officially called, and clarifying the debate that swirls around it today. Central to the story is Ronald Reagan himself. Even before assuming the Presidency, he had expressed strong interest in trying to defend the nation from enemy missiles and had shown a curiosity about the powers of high technology. Newly elected to public office in 1967, Mr. Reagan became the first Governor of California to visit the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., one of the country's premier facilities for research on weapons and such exotic technologies as laser fusion. It had been founded by Dr. Teller in the 1950's.

''We showed him all the complex projects,'' Dr. Teller recalled in an interview. ''He listened carefully and interrupted maybe a dozen times. Every one of his questions was to the point. He clearly comprehended the technology. And there was no skimping on time. He came in the morning and stayed over lunch.''

In 1980 during the Republican Presidential primary campaign, Mr. Reagan, recalled a tour he had recently taken of the North American Defense Command, a secret installation in a hollowed-out mountain in Colorado, and said he was perplexed at the lack of space-based defense.

''They actually are tracking several thousand objects in space, meaning satellites of ours and everyone else's, even down to the point that they are tracking a glove lost by an astronaut,'' he was quoted as saying in the book ''With Enough Shovels'' by Robert Scheer. ''I think the thing that struck me was the irony that here, with this great technology of ours, we can do all of this, yet we cannot stop any of the weapons that are coming at us. I don't think there's been a time in history when there wasn't a defense against some kind of thrust, even back in the old-fashioned days when we had coast artillery that would stop invading ships.''