The heart of "Star Wars" is Lowell Lincoln Wood, the freewheeling 50-year-old scientist who runs the Special Studies group at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory near Oakland, Calif. He is the father of Brilliant Pebbles just as Edward Teller, his friend and mentor, was the father of the hydrogen bomb. Each is a tireless promoter of his brainchild. Wood's role in the militarization of space is crucial. From a practical point of view, his machinery - Brilliant Pebbles and Brilliant Eyes - is first in line for space, carrying with it the official blessing of the White House and the Pentagon. Wood can also pitch his ideas to key decision-makers. Both through Teller and on his own he has briefed George Bush and Ronald Reagan in the White House, has grown close to Dan Quayle's National Space Council, meets with the heads of the Strategic Defense Initiative, lobbies members of Congress and shares strategies with conservative think tanks. The University of California, which manages the lab for the federal government, has given him free rein to do as he pleases without consequences. With the university's tacit approval, he is permitted to work in a secrecy unusual even in a nuclear-weapons lab, which in this case was founded by Teller. Wood is a fountain of ideas, a domineering, sometimes insulting boss. "Some people love Lowell. They think he's a genius, a 50-year-old enfant terrible who's worth every drop of sweat they've paid to work for him. Or else they think he's a babbling, know-nothing jackass," says Robert Budwine, a senior Livermore scientist. Throughout his career, Wood has carried a reputation for promotion and exaggeration. Even as a graduate student at UCLA in the mid-'60s, that was the rap. A former professor, Peter Goldreich, says: "There's no doubt Lowell's a bright guy, but he had an entrepreneurial bent even then. He had flamboyant claims for his work as a student." Wood's predilection for hyperbole was demonstrated in the X-ray laser affair, which stretched out, in secrecy and then in public, across much of the 1980s. He and Teller flew often to Washington, selling the highest officials of the Reagan administration on the merits of a laser powered by a nuclear explosive. The laser proved enormously difficult to perfect, as the critics had warned all along. Hundreds of millions of dollars later, it has never been built. Like many of Wood's ideas, Brilliant Pebbles was not completely new. Similar ideas - swarms of killer satellites - went back three decades, but the technology was unavailable. Once the technology was developed, says John Foster, a consultant for defense contractor TRW and a former director of Livermore, "what this guy Lowell Wood did was kind of drive it to the limit." Foster says that Wood's insistence on building satellites lighter and cheaper has made him "the pioneer of the necessary revolution" that has moved the entire industry toward smaller satellites. But Brilliant Pebbles has not lived up to the billing Wood gave it. A system of Pebbles would cost more and defend against far fewer missiles than he optimistically predicted a few years ago. Wood's strategy is the same one taken by Teller in the past: Avoid Congress and go straight to the White House for support. Earlier this year, Wood co-wrote recommendations calling for a dramatic alteration of the top echelon of NASA that would expand the power of Dan Quayle and the Space Council. In March, Wood and Mark Albrecht, then the Space Council's executive director, helped engineer Quayle's ouster of NASA administrator Richard Truly and replacement with a friend of the Livermore lab, Dan Goldin. An obscure figure outside the defense industry, Goldin was well known at Livermore; he headed TRW's program to build Brilliant Pebbles. "Dan is a supporter of Livermore," says Foster, who counseled Goldin to take the NASA job and acknowledged that Wood had "input" in the selection. "Dan has worked with Lowell; he has worked with Edward Teller." Another friend, Mike Griffin, has moved from the SDI Organization (SDIO) to NASA, where he heads its Mars mission. So look for Wood's involvement in the space-exploration business. Mark Hopkins, the executive director of Spacecause, a lobbying group, calls Wood and his Washington friends "The Young Turks." They are eager to push ahead with space exploration and space weaponry as quickly as possible - and draw little distinction between the two endeavors. Richard Garwin, one of the nation's senior defense consultants, views this Young Turk network as a new threat to the country. "Their informal communication is not revealed publicly. It can be a source of efficiency, but things can happen that are undesirable. There has been a big effort to use secrecy to keep people out for policy reasons. People who are totally reliable do not have access simply because they would criticize the programs. SDIO just goes ahead, on the basis of assumptions that are untenable, with a program whose main purpose is to keep themselves alive until better times come for its deployment."