Test of ‘Star Wars’ Missile Shield to Launch Tonight

With the fiery liftoff of a missile from Vandenberg Air Force Base tonight, the controversial heir to Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” missile defense program is scheduled to take a major step toward becoming reality.

The launch, 13 years after President Reagan proposed his initiative, will begin the first test of whether a fully developed “kill vehicle” lofted on the tip of a rocket can locate and smash a surrogate enemy “warhead” streaking toward its target.

In today’s test, an intercontinental Minuteman missile will be shot out to sea from Vandenberg, north of Santa Barbara, carrying a dummy warhead. About 20 minutes after the launch, an interceptor missile developed by Raytheon Co. will be launched from the Marshall Islands 4,300 miles from Vandenberg. If all goes as authorities hope, the interceptor will strike the dummy warhead over the Pacific.

If this $100-million launch and just one of two upcoming tests succeed, officials are prepared to declare the system technically viable. Advocates hope that would open the way for President Clinton to order deployment of a national missile “shield” next summer to protect all 50 states.

While the remaining tests will be tough, a successful shot tonight “would be a very high confidence-builder,” a senior Pentagon official said Friday. And he stressed: “We expect success.”

But the test, expected to begin between 7 and 10 p.m. PDT and to last for about 29 minutes, has incited critics, who contended that deploying the huge missile shield would undermine arms control treaties and set off an arms race. Other nations, fearing that the American shield would render their missiles useless, would begin developing more new missiles or shields of their own, critics said.

Opponents also contended that the Pentagon is setting the yardstick for judging the test’s success so low that it can claim progress, thereby increasing political pressure on the administration to deploy the system without sufficient study or testing.

Tonight’s test also has set off a public relations battle between the program’s advocates and its critics, each of whom believe that public perceptions of the system’s workability will shape coming political decisions about whether it should be built.

Because of past delays in testing the system, the Pentagon will conduct only three tests before the Clinton administration makes a decision about deployment, Isaacs said. If the system is deployed, there will be 16 more tests before the system becomes operational.

But critics maintained that is not enough, citing the discontinued Safeguard missile defense system, briefly deployed in the 1970s, in which 42 tests were performed.

John Isaacs, president of Council for a Livable World, an arms-control advocacy group in Washington, charged that deploying on the basis of insufficient testing “is like saying that one test of an AIDS vaccine in a monkey proves the vaccines will be successful with humans.”

As currently conceived, the national missile defense program eventually could involve as many as 200 interceptor missiles arrayed in two sites to protect the United States from an attack by a handful of missiles from a rogue state, such as North Korea or from an accidental launch.

Administration officials said that they would not give the go-ahead unless they were convinced the program is technically viable, affordable, essential to meet foreign threats and does not undermine arms control agreements.

The GAO estimated last year that a national missile defense system built at one site in North Dakota would cost $28 billion over 20 years. That does not include the full costs of earlier research.

One key obstacle has been the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty with Russia, which sharply limits the size of any anti-missile system. U.S. officials now are trying to talk the reluctant Russians into agreeing to ease the treaty’s restrictions. The ABM treaty limits missile defense programs to a single site and includes other restrictions.

The United States is in “intense discussions” with Russia to get greater flexibility under the agreement, including movement of its missile defense site from North Dakota to Alaska. The Alaska site would permit the United States to better protect U.S. coasts--including California--which officials believe are poorly served by the North Dakota site.

Because of the thousands of miles they must travel, the national shield missiles must be able to find and strike their targets at speeds of 15,000 mph.

Besides the dummy warhead, the ICBM launched today will carry a ballon about two meters in diameter that will function as a decoy. About 4 1/2 minutes after launch, the warhead and the balloon will separate from the rocket.

About 20 minutes after the Minuteman launch, the interceptor missile will be launched from the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. When this rocket and the target from Vandenberg are about 1,400 miles apart, the “kill vehicle” will separate from the rocket beneath it and fly off toward the “warhead.”

The 120-pound kill vehicle is equipped with a computer, heat and optical sensors, telemetry equipment and small rockets that enable it to maneuver in space so that it can head toward its target. Its task in this test, officials said, is to find the “warhead,” distinguishing it from the decoy balloon, and then to strike it about 140 miles above earth.

The kill vehicle carries no explosive and looks less like a menacing space weapon than an assemblage of various pieces of scientific equipment.

But the force of impact is so great that the two objects will be “atomized” said a defense official--blown to “smaller particles than you can imagine.” Should the vehicles miss, they would burn up when they reentered the atmosphere.