Despite successes, missile defense is still in its infancy

By Matt Kelley

Associated Press

WASHINGTON – The Pentagon’s latest missile defense test was successful, but many more experiments are necessary to prove that the U.S. system can shoot enemy warheads out of the sky, military officials and outside experts say.

“I think we can say … our test program is proceeding and showing some quite impressive success,” Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said Saturday.

On Friday night, a prototype interceptor slammed into a dummy warhead 140 miles above the Pacific, destroying both. It was the sixth test of a ground-based missile defense prototype and the fourth successful destruction of the dummy warhead.

The military also is developing other types of anti-missile systems; a ship-based interceptor rocket successfully hit a dummy warhead in a test earlier this year.

“I’ll say right off the bat before some critic discovers it, this was not a realistic test of exactly what intercepts would have to do,” Wolfowitz said in an interview on CNN. “But it’s the first time we have had anything that looked like a decoy warhead, and it picked out the real warhead from the decoys.”

At least 19 more tests are needed before the ground-based missile defense system is fully operational, said Lt. Col. Rick Lehner, a spokesman for the Defense Department’s Missile Defense Agency. Those tests – one every three months – will last until 2006 or 2007, Lehner said.

Missile defense skeptics said that’s an important point.

“We have a long way to go before the final exam,” said Chris Madison of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. “I’m concerned that people have the impression, based on these tests, that we’re almost to missile defense. Until we have operational testing, we’ll have no idea whether we can get there.”

The Bush administration is pressing ahead with development of the anti-missile systems, saying the United States needs a defense if a rogue country like North Korea develops and fires long-range missiles at American shores.

President Bush announced last year he was pulling the United States out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, which bans such missile defenses. Russia and some other countries have criticized the move.

Domestic missile defense critics say the program is too costly and too easily defeated with simple countermeasures or by firing a larger number of missiles.

Designing, testing and building a system of land- and sea-based missile defenses would cost between $23 billion and $64 billion by 2015, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated earlier this year.

The interceptor in Friday’s test, launched from Meck Island in Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific near the equator, destroyed the dummy warhead at 9:41 p.m. EST, Pentagon spokeswoman Cheryl Irwin said. The test warhead was carried on a modified Minuteman II missile launched 4,800 miles away at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

Friday’s test was the most complex of its kind so far, although it was still a developmental test. The dummy missile jettisoned three balloons to try to fool the interceptor. The previous test in December included only one decoy balloon.

The interceptor used its own sensors to pick out the warhead, track it and move in to collide with and destroy it, a Pentagon statement said.

Wolfowitz told Congress last month that the Pentagon hoped to have four prototype anti-missile rockets stationed in Alaska in two years.

That would happen before operational tests, which will use the most realistic scenarios. The Missile Defense Agency hopes to shift to tests over the North Pacific after 2004 for its more realistic tests, Lehner said.