WASHINGTON -- The White House and Senate Democrats Tuesday abandoned their longstanding opposition to a politically popular bill that calls for a national defense against limited long-range missile attacks.

The actions Tuesday all but assure overwhelming approval of the overall bill, which declares it to be United States policy to field a system against ballistic missile threats from rogue nations like North Korea and Iran as soon as "technologically possible."

The Administration dropped its threatened veto by President Clinton after the Senate passed a compromise amendment that Democrats say insures that any anti-missile system will not interfere with arms-control negotiations with Russia.

A final vote in the Senate is expected on Wednesday. The House is scheduled to debate and is likely to pass a similar, bipartisan bill on Thursday.

While neither bill authorizes a specific system or appropriates money to build it, the measures, if enacted, represent the Government's most forceful bipartisan support for the anti-missile policy.

Administration officials said that the Senate compromise defuses a potent national security campaign issue that Republicans could have wielded against Democrats, and tries to finesse a nettlesome issue before the Russian Prime Minister, Yevgeny M. Primakov, visits Washington next week.

Russia has long opposed an American anti-missile system, and conditioned further reductions in its nuclear arsenal on Washington's compliance with the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972.

Fielding an anti-missile system would require changes in that treaty, and Russia's leaders have expressed alarm over revived plans for such a system.

The compromise amendment, passed on a vote of 99 to 0, asserts that the United States will continue to negotiate cuts in Russia's nuclear forces, which Democrats interpret as language that is inextricably linked to the ABM treaty. But Republicans rejected any explicit language that would have tied deployment of an anti-missile system to adherence to the ABM treaty.

Critics said that by failing to incorporate language that would specifically require adherence to the treaty, the overall measure could face opposition from Russia's leaders and its Parliament, which is considering ratification of the second strategic arms reduction treaty, or Start 2.

But the White House appeared satisfied with the compromise. "If this were the final bill we'd accept it," Robert G. Bell, a senior national security official, said tonight.

Tuesday's action marks a significant departure for Senate Democrats, who twice last year narrowly blocked the same measure from coming to the Senate floor, and for the White House, which had wielded a veto threat, arguing that it was bad policy to deploy such a costly system based only on technological merit.

The measure has since picked up bipartisan support after missile tests by North Korea and Iran and recent disclosures that China may have stolen nuclear secrets from an American weapons laboratory that enhances China's long-range missiles.

"This bill recognizes the threat is real and that the world has changed," said Senator Mary L. Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat who helped broker the compromise amendment with Senator Olympia J. Snowe, Republican of Maine.

In January, the Administration began to backpedal.

The White House announced it was asking Russia to renegotiate the ABM treaty to permit a limited national missile defense. At the same time, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen and the Joint Chiefs of Staff testified to Congress that the Administration was pledging $6.6 billion over the next six years to build a network of radars and interceptor missiles.

That commitment increased the budget for a national missile defense to $10.5 billion between now and 2005. The Administration has said it will decide next year whether to build an anti-missile system -- perhaps based in Alaska or North Dakota, or on ships -- that would be ready by 2005. That type of anti-missile system is a far cry from President Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" vision to use lasers in space as a shield against nuclear attack. Even on a smaller scale, the current program remains burdened by technological problems.

While senior American officials sought to calm Russian fears by asserting that the system was designed to protect against outlaw nations, Democratic unity in the Senate was fracturing so badly that Democratic leaders expressed concern they would not be able to muster the 34 votes to sustain a Presidential veto.

So Democrats negotiated two amendments that were general enough for Democrats to interpret them the way they wanted, and yet were not offensive to Republicans. The first, which also passed 99 to 0, assures that money to be spent on any missile system would go through the regular appropriations process. The second was the arms control amendment.

The amendments were embraced by Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi, the bill's chief Republican sponsor, and Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, one of its chief Democratic opponents.

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