Interceptor Misses Target in Missile Shield Test

A prototype missile-defense “kill vehicle” failed Tuesday evening to find and destroy a surrogate enemy warhead fired into space from Vandenberg Air Force Base, dealing a new setback to the controversial Pentagon program intended to protect the country from intercontinental attacks by rogue nations.

Defense officials said that the interceptor, fired from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands at 6:39 p.m., approximately 20 minutes after the target’s liftoff from the California base, unaccountably missed the surrogate warhead as the two streaked through the skies in opposite directions over the Pacific Ocean about 140 miles above the Earth’s surface. Few other details of the launch were immediately available.

“We did not have an intercept,” said Lt. Col. Rick Lehner, a spokesman for the Pentagon’s Ballistic Missile Defense Organization. As to the causes, he said, “we don’t have any idea. . . . We don’t know what happened when it got into space.”

Program officials immediately launched a review of the $100-million flight test and indicated that they may report their tentative conclusions in about two days. It is still possible that some aspects of the test will be deemed successful, officials said.

The failure measurably increases the odds that President Clinton will choose not to deploy a national missile shield--the scaled-down successor to Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” program--when he takes up the issue this summer.

The missile defense program has been racing to develop a system that could counter the rising threat of ballistic missile attack from countries such as North Korea and Iran. Pentagon officials have drafted plans to deploy a system of 100 interceptors, probably based in Alaska, perhaps as early as 2005.

But the proposed system would be the most complex weapon ever developed, and defense officials said before Tuesday’s test that they will find it difficult to recommend deployment unless it succeeds in at least one of the two flight tests scheduled before Clinton’s decision.

Now, the system’s advocates must lay their hopes on a final flight test scheduled to take place in late April or May.

The missile defense program has become an urgent diplomatic and political issue. Russian, Chinese and some European officials maintain that the system, by raising the possibility of an America that could someday be impervious to missile attack, would undermine the global nuclear balance.

It would also violate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, a key arms control agreement between the United States and Russia.

U.S. officials, in response, have insisted that the system is intended only to defend against “rogue” regimes, and not systems with thousands of warheads, like Russia’s.

All the Republican presidential candidates want to proceed with the system, while Vice President Al Gore and former Sen. Bill Bradley are more cautious.

The last test of the technology, in October, was officially judged a success. Although some critics disputed this assessment, it was hailed by missile-defense advocates as proof that the system can be effectively deployed by the target date of 2005.

Tuesday’s failure, on the other hand, suggests that despite a breakneck development schedule, the multibillion-dollar system is not ready. That, in turn, could make it more politically palatable for Clinton to decide against deployment or to leave the decision for his successor in the White House, many experts said.

The president has been cautious about the program but has appeared to take some steps forward. This year’s budget proposal will recommend a 20% increase for national missile defense, lifting spending to about $13 billion.

Tuesday’s test was designed to give a much better picture of how the system’s components could work together.

After the target missile lifted off, the heat from its blast was to be picked up by sensors on military satellites. Information on the missile’s speed, trajectory and possible point of impact were to be relayed to a command center in Colorado Springs, Colo., which was to cue radars in Hawaii to begin tracking the target’s progress.

These radars are surrogates of “X-band” radars, now under development, that are designed to have greater capability to pick out objects at great distances.

The data from Colorado Springs was to be supplemented with other information on the target’s position and then passed on to a new computer “battle management” center at Kwajalein Atoll. This center, which was to get its first flight test in this exercise, would function as the brains of the missile defense system.

The interceptor was launched from Kwajalein 20 minutes after the mock enemy missile was launched from Vandenberg at 6:19 p.m. About 2 1/2 minutes after liftoff, the interceptor’s booster rocket was to fall away, leaving the “exoatmospheric kill vehicle” to maneuver through space to find the target.

This kill vehicle, equipped with infrared and optical sensors, uses small rocket thrusters to maneuver into the right path in an area called the “intercept” basket, about 140 miles above the Earth.

The vehicle carries no explosives or other weapons, but a collision at a speed of 14,000 miles an hour would have turned the simulated warhead--or a real one--into tiny particles of “space dust.”

While Tuesday’s miss was a clear setback for the missile defense program, even a collision would have been likely to set off loud arguments about how much value the flight tests really have in judging the merits of the new technology.

Critics of the system, including traditional arms control advocates, contend that development is still in such an early stage that the test results have only marginal value in judging what the system will ultimately be able to do. The four flight tests to date are only a small part of the 19 that are to be conducted before the system is ready.

To deploy the system based on the results to date “would be a great mistake,” said John Isaacs, president of the Council for a Livable World, a Washington arms control advocacy group.

Many argue that the system is unlikely to ever work and can’t be as valuable in protecting the country as the arms agreements it threatens.

And some critics argue that defense officials have not always been completely candid about test shortcomings. Only last week, Pentagon officials revealed that in the October test, the kill vehicle at first failed to spot the target and fixed its course instead on a decoy balloon that was released with the fake warhead to fool the defenders.

Nevertheless, they contended that the vehicle’s ultimate collision with the mock warhead meant the test should be counted a success.

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* TOUGH TALK

China is once again referring to the United States military as a “paper tiger.” A5

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Missile Target Test

A “kill vehicle” launched from Kwajalein Atoll failed to hit its target, a dummy warhead on a modified Minuteman missile launched Tuesday night from Vandenberg Air Force Base. Shown here is how the maneuver should have worked:

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Sources: Department of Defense, Associated Press