A high-speed missile collision that illuminated clouds over the South Pacific reverberated across the capital Sunday.
A direct hit during Saturday night’s first test to see if incoming long-range missiles can be destroyed in space heightens pressure on President Clinton to come to a decision he has been reluctant to make throughout his seven years in office.
In less than a year, the White House says, Clinton will decide whether to deploy a missile shield that could upset U.S.-Russian relations and possibly upend the 1972 Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty, viewed by arms control advocates as the bedrock of nuclear weapons stability.
Now, the technical problems cited by critics of a shield seem surmountable.
“This was a major milestone,” Air Force Maj. Nickolas Demidovich, one of the key test officials, said Sunday.
Air Force Lt. Col. Rick Lehner, spokesman for the Pentagon’s Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, said the successful destruction of the dummy warhead “helps to give us the technical information the president needs to make a deployment decision next summer.”
A breakthrough, which will surely embolden supporters of such a shield, occurred 140 miles up in space at 9:32 p.m. Chicago time Saturday night. That’s when an unarmed warhead launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on the California coast was hit by an “exoatmospheric kill vehicle” launched from an Army test range on a Pacific atoll 4,300 miles to the southwest.
More than 300 technicians and controllers at the Pentagon and in Colorado, California and the Pacific monitored the target missile and the interceptor, which blasted off minutes later from Meck Island in the Kwajalein Atoll.
Once in space, the payload stage of the target missile opened up and deployed a cone-shaped object about the size of a refrigerator. Seconds later it loosed a foil-wrapped balloon as a decoy. A key part of the test was for the kill vehicle to distinguish the real threat, the dummy warhead, from the decoy.
Equipped with infrared and optical sensors, as well as small thrusters to adjust course, the kill vehicle, 55 inches long and 120 pounds, closed in on the target at a combined speed of 16,000 miles per hour. The collision caused a brilliant explosion visible through the clouds from an observation post on one of the Kwajalein islands. Two Pentagon aircraft flying above the clouds filmed the brief, brilliant flash.
A civilian controller at Kwajalein intoned flatly, “We have an intercept.”
Mission specialists said both the kill vehicle and the target were reduced to dust.
Now that the technical impediments seem less formidable, a key reason Clinton could have cited in refusing to deploy has fallen away.
Clinton and congressional Democrats have also long resisted deploying a missile defense shield for all 50 states because of its implications for arms control and U.S.-Russian relations and because of its cost. The harshest critics of the program view it as a defense boondoggle, a holdover of President Reagan’s Cold War-era “Star Wars” nuclear umbrella.
For advocates of missile defense, the flash over the South Pacific heralds Reagan’s long-awaited promise that a U.S.-built shield–not theories of mutually assured destruction–could protect Americans from nuclear attack.
Technology has been the biggest obstacle, as underscored by the failure of six of the first eight tests of a theater-range system over the past year-plus. But an enthusiastic Congress, with allies at the Pentagon, has persisted.
Since 1984, research and development of theater-range and national missile defenses has cost taxpayers $55 billion, according to Department of Defense figures. If Clinton gives the go-ahead, the Pentagon would spend $10.5 billion fielding the national defense system over the next six years.
Much the way sports enthusiasts talk about how hitting a baseball is the most difficult athletic endeavor, military specialists say that “hitting a bullet with a bullet” is the greatest challenge taken on by military technology.
Weapons systems developed by the United States and Israel have succeeded in downing slower-moving, lower-flying and shorter-range missiles. The test Saturday night marked the first concrete sign that a warhead of intercontinental range could be hit in space with pinpoint accuracy and destroyed.
Boeing Co.’s Space & Communications Group in Seal Beach, Calif., is managing the development and test program under a $1.6 billion contract awarded last year, according to Boeing spokesman George Torres. Raytheon Co. built the prototype kill vehicle at a plant in Tucson, Ariz.
The test encompassed only a limited part of an operational national missile defense. The full system would tie together early warning satellites that can detect the heat plume of rocket launches, ground- and space-based radar systems, and an elaborate command, control and communications system.
The interceptor launched Saturday night aboard a two-stage Minuteman II missile rocketed into a preprogrammed position. The only question at issue was whether the kill vehicle, launched on a three-stage Minuteman II, could locate and hit the target as they sped toward one another.
Moreover, the target missile deployed only one decoy. In future tests, the interceptor may have to sort through several decoys to find the target.
“We wanted to make it a real straightforward test to test the kill vehicle,” Demidovich said.
Despite its limitations, the potential implications of the test on U.S. foreign and security policy are enormous.
The Pentagon view is that one more successful test intercept– two attempts are scheduled for early next year– will give Clinton enough information to approve as early as next summer deployment of a national missile defense system.
Deployment, which could be completed by 2005, would likely require a major rewrite or outright abandonment of the ABM treaty. That Cold War-era pact was designed to discourage the United States and the Soviet Union from developing missile defenses that could encourage offensive first strikes.
The fear was that a country with an effective missile defense might be tempted to launch a devastating first strike because its missile shield would protect against nuclear retaliation. Thus, although the missile defense system is protective, it could destabilize the nuclear balance by encouraging offensive and aggressive behavior.
The end of the Cold War and the rise of “rogue” states with improving missile capability–Iran, Iraq, North Korea are the chief examples–has changed the equation. Security experts say that in 10 or 15 years the United States could be vulnerable to an attack involving a handful of missiles or to an accidental launch of one or more Russian missiles.
“The new missile threats confronting the United States are far different from the Cold War threat,” the CIA said last month in a declassified version of a report on missile threats. “The new missile threats involve states with considerably fewer missiles with less accuracy, yield, survivability, reliability, and range-payload capability than the hostile strategic forces we have faced for 30 years. Even so, the new systems are threatening, but in different ways.”
The CIA concluded that rogue states would not likely use long-range missiles as weapons of war, but would covet the coercive power and deterrent effect that mere possession of the weapons carries.
Because of the limited nature of the threat, plans for a defensive system are also limited. The initial phase could involve as few as 20 interceptor missiles, based either in Alaska or North Dakota. Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, is strongly behind the Alaska option. Eventually, bases in both of those states with 100 interceptors each might be established, at considerable cost beyond the $10.5 billion budgeted over the next six years.
Throughout Clinton’s presidency, Republicans on Capitol Hill have trumpeted the threat of missile attack, forced Clinton to accept higher spending on missile defense and accused the White House of ignoring a gaping hole in U.S. national security.
In 1995, House Republicans incorporated a national missile defense clause into their Contract With America. With Saturday night’s test, they sounded a note of vindication.
“This is a major development,” said Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee and one of the leading national missile defense advocates. “It puts the administration in a very difficult position: there are no more reasons to oppose the national missile defense system we have been advocating for the past six years.”
The White House offered a guarded assessment.
Administration spokesman David Leavy called the test “an important step in the technological development” of a national missile defense system. But he said Clinton will make his decision based not only on technical issues but also with eye toward cost and strategic concerns. Clinton still supports maintaining the ABM Treaty.
“The challenge for us is to work with the Russians to amend the treaty to take into account the threat posed by rogue states,” Leavy said.
Critics of the missile defense effort say a highly controlled test proves little about whether all 50 states could be shielded. They say rogue states could get around the elaborate and costly system through low-tech strategies, such as smuggling nuclear or chemical weapons into the United States in suitcases or floating them into a major harbor aboard ship.
“This is an all-pain, no-gain proposition,” said Tom Collina of the Union of Concerned Scientists, an arms control advocacy group.
