(FORTUNE Magazine) – The U.S. Senate's failure to pass a defense authorization bill in August is widely and properly viewed as a policy disaster. On the brighter side, the debate leading up to the disaster makes great reading for the beach. Anybody looking for flyweight literature evidencing minimal seriousness could do worse than the Senate sections of the Congressional Record for August 7 and 10. We had reached for these documents mainly out of curiosity about the future of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a.k.a. Star Wars. SDI's future would seem to qualify as a serious issue. Thousands of intercontinental missiles remain in Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. It is unclear how securely they are monitored, but we keep reading ominous stories about missile transfers to other countries; in Kazakhstan, for example, there have been charges of sales to Iran by corrupt officials. In any case, something like 20 non-NATO countries now possess ballistic missiles of various ranges. By the turn of the century, 40 or 50 countries are expected to have nuclear, chemical, or biological warheads. By 2010 or so, dozens of minor powers might have an ability to hit the continental U.S. with such weaponry. In the circumstances, some kind of ballistic missile defense seems indicated, and, in fact, Congress formally committed to a BMD in last year's defense bill. But the nature of the defense, the technology to sustain it, and the timetable for development remain very much up for grabs. All of which was supposed to be clarified in this year's defense bill. After several hours of hovering over the great debate, we retain a memory of a few Senators with strong views about SDI's direction: Jim Sasser of Tennessee wanted the program cut substantially and deployment stretched out over many years; Malcolm Wallop of Wyoming argued persuasively, in our humble opinion, for an opposite posture, with the earliest possible deployment of the ''brilliant pebbles'' technology, which would attack incoming missiles via mini-satellites in space. But what you mainly take away from the great debate is a lot of guys playing their own parochial angles. Here is Al D'Amato of New York, carrying on forever about the need to preserve the ecological purity of the area around the Grumman test facility on Long Island. (Al will be facing a superliberal Democrat in the fall elections.) Here is William Cohen of Maine, laboriously registering angst about the planned closing of Loring Air Force Base in Aroostook County. Here are all sorts of chaps concerned with jobs in their states. Boilerplate formulation, courtesy of McCain of Arizona: ''I do not believe we should fund any defense program simply to preserve jobs. Nevertheless . . .'' Here is Pat Moynihan of New York lengthily embroidering his own special relationship to scientist Hans Bethe, ''a man of transparent goodness,'' who opposes SDI. As we write in late August, it is unclear whether the deeply divided Senate will manage to pass any defense bill at all in the fiscal year ending September 30, also unclear what happens to various defense programs in the absence of a bill -- a totally unprecedented situation. ''This may be the year we all go over the cliff,'' was Sam Nunn's recent formulation. It's an image to put a glint in many an eye.