U.S. missile tests leave questions unanswered

By Jeanne Rubner

MUNICH (DPA): The sounds of relieved back-slapping echoed through the halls of the Pentagon in Washington when the latest test of the National Missile Defense (NMD) succeeded. After two test attempts failed recently, the country's military desperately needed a success.

President George W. Bush will likewise have breathed a sigh of relief -- he wants to put a defense shield against enemy missiles in place as quickly as possible. To get that done, he's requested a budget of US$8.3 billion from Congress for 2002 alone.

On Sunday morning, some 225 kilometers over the Pacific Ocean, an explosion occurred. Just minutes earlier a Minuteman missile had been launched from Vandenburg military base in California, carrying a mock warhead and a black balloon as a decoy warhead.

Twenty-one minutes later, satellites registered the launch and informed a control center in Colorado, which launched a second, interceptor missile carrying an "kill vehicle" warhead from the Marshall Islands in the Pacific.

Shortly after launch, the kill vehicle detached from its carrier missile and made a bee line for the intruder. Radar and infra-red sensors located the mock warhead and half-way across the ocean the two collided at 25,750 kilometers per hour. The force of the explosion destroyed both.

Shortly after the successful kill, Gen. Ronald Kadish, the head of the Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, said the military thinks that the test was a success. The reasons for his cautious reaction are twofold.

First, for the time being, the Pentagon can be sure of only one fact: that the kill vehicle found the mock warhead. It will be months before the whole test procedure has been evaluated. And even Kadish has admitted that analysis of tests which at first seemed successful can uncover problems.

Secondly, the military knows that celebrations would be premature. On the whole, the tests have been less than convincing, with the score standing at two-two. Two attempts, the last exactly one year ago, have failed. One succumbed to a failure in a system which cools infra-red sensors. The kill vehicle's infra-red eyes were blinded and it missed the target. Another test floundered when the interceptor head failed to detach from its missile.

In a recent interview with the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, physicist and former Pentagon advisor Theodore Postol described those setbacks as simple accidents.

Numerous critics of NMD believe the 50-50 rate is exaggerated, arguing that the first and only successful interception test among the four attempted thus far was too simple to be meaningful. Moreover, this four-test program was preceded by two tests which aimed to detect various mock warheads in space. Several engineers involved say that results from these tests were fabricated.

Detection of mock warheads is one of the most difficult tasks facing the NMD team. The black plastic balloon used in Sunday's test should have been fairly easy to distinguish from the warhead but enemy aggressors are unlikely to arm their missiles with just one mock device.

An internal Pentagon report published recently criticized the simplicity of tests to date. Other tricks can be used to confuse the kill vehicle, such as metal chaff which confuses radar sensors.

Thomas Collina of the Union of Concerned Scientists said that because of the relative simplicity of Sunday's test, it shouldn't be used to justify a dubious concept.

Trying to build NMD was like trying to fire a hole into another hole, which was moving at 25,000 kilometers per hour, said Philip Coyle, head of weapons testing under Bill Clinton.

The development program carries a high pricetag, too. The ground-based NMD system, conceived by the Clinton administration, will reportedly cost an estimated $60 billion.

Meanwhile the Pentagon has released its latest plans. To be able to intercept all potential enemy missiles fired from anywhere on the globe, it is considering an additional fleet of ships and planes armed with lasers.

Land, sea and space -- in terms of cost, that three-pronged strategy is nearly out of this world. Though the Pentagon didn't mention a figure, experts believe the budget could run to several hundred billions of dollars.