Vandenberg Launch to Begin Missile Defense Flight Test

The Pentagon made final preparations Thursday for a missile defense flight test that has drawn intense world interest, yet will leave unanswered key technical questions about the system’s ability to shield the United States from attack.

Beginning with the fiery liftoff of a Minuteman II rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base this evening, the $100-million test will examine whether the components of the complex system can work together to track and destroy a dummy warhead more than 100 miles in space.

If a “kill vehicle” carried aloft by a second missile from a Pacific island scores a hit, the Pentagon may formally judge the system to be “technically viable.” President Clinton then would be expected to authorize preliminary steps that would lead to construction of a system.

This widely anticipated move has generated enormous interest in the program, including from foreign governments who fear that the U.S. missile shield would disturb the global nuclear balance and undermine international arms accords.

Yet even after the test, much will remain unknown about the complex project. For starters, the rockets, radars and some other components are only surrogates for the equipment that would be used in the system that eventually would be deployed. The real interceptor rocket, for example, would be 10 times more powerful--and thus would subject the small kill vehicle it carries to far more stress at launch.

In addition, in this test, the interceptor rocket will be guided toward the target under carefully controlled conditions that never would occur in a real ICBM attack.

The test flight also comes amid continuing questions from critics about whether the system could handle the kind of deceptive countermeasures that U.S. intelligence agencies predict adversaries will build into their missiles in the next few years.

The Pentagon says its system would be capable of distinguishing a warhead from a small number of simple decoys that enemy missiles might deploy. But critics maintain that America’s potential adversaries, including North Korea and Iran, will be able to build more sophisticated and numerous decoys. They cite U.S. intelligence reports suggesting that these governments probably could get help from the more advanced decoy programs of Russia and China.

The Pentagon “has defined the threat to be less than it actually might be in the real world,” Lisbeth Gronlund of the Union of Concerned Scientists, an arms control group, said at a news conference.

Pentagon officials contend that they will be able to make an accurate judgment about the system’s workability after tonight’s test. At the same time, they note that this is only the third of 19 flight tests and say that the ultimate decisions on deployment will be made years from now--and by a different president.

“There are many tests to come,” Adm. Craig Quigley, a Pentagon spokesman, told reporters. “That national decision [on deployment] will be made far down the road.”

The first flight test, conducted last October, was a partial success because the kill vehicle struck its target after initially drifting off course.

In the second test, in January, the kill vehicle missed the target by 300 to 400 feet after a clogged cooling line interfered with the functioning of a sensor.

Today’s test is scheduled to take place sometime between 7 and 11 p.m.

It will begin with the launch from Vandenberg of a Minuteman II missile carrying in its nose a dummy nuclear warhead. The mock target is a conical object about 5 feet high.

The nose also will contain an uninflated, 6-foot-diameter Mylar balloon, which will be inflated and released with the warhead to duplicate the kind of simple decoy an enemy attacker might use to throw off an interceptor.

About five minutes after launch, the dummy warhead and decoy will be released from the target rocket into space. Fifteen minutes after that, the surrogate interceptor rocket will be fired from Kwajalein Atoll, located 4,300 miles from Vandenberg in the Marshall Islands.

If all goes as planned, a defense satellite with infrared sensors will detect the launch of the target missile and relay that information to ground-based radars in Hawaii and Kwajalein. The information will, in turn, be sent on to the electronic brain of the interceptor rocket to help it adjust its course.

But it will get other assistance, too, in the form of pre-programmed data about the course the target will be taking. And critics charge that the decoy balloon, which is supposed to confuse the interceptor, will in this configuration actually lead it toward the target.

Once in space, the 130-pound kill vehicle atop the interceptor rocket will break free and, using sensors and tiny thruster rockets, maneuver its way into the path of the target. A collision, at about 15,000 mph, would reduce both vehicles to particles of dust.

Defense officials say they have made some aspects of the test artificially easy so they can examine the performance of various components without being thrown off by an extraneous event.

This approach of “walking before you run” is routinely used in all development programs, they say.

Critics acknowledge that this approach is typical. But they argue that the administration should not be deciding whether to build the system based on such preliminary tests.

While this attempt “may help the Pentagon to walk before it can run, it cannot be used as the basis for a presidential decision to deploy,” the Union of Concerned Scientists said in a statement.

Opponents of the proposed system have mobilized for the tests, calling news conferences and organizing protests near Vandenberg and in the waters just offshore from the base.

The environmentalist group Greenpeace announced that it was sending its vessel MV Arctic Sunrise into waters off California that the Navy has declared an “exclusion zone” during the test. The ship was sailing toward the area Thursday and planned to anchor 35 miles off Vandenberg.

Meanwhile, 50 U.S. Nobel Prize laureates warned Clinton in a letter that deployment of a national missile shield would be “premature, wasteful and dangerous.”

The scientists, drawn from various fields, said missile defense system “would offer little protection and would do grave harm to this nation’s core security interests.”

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Missile Target Test

A dummy warhead placed on a modified Minuteman missile and scheduled to be launched Friday evening from Vandenberg Air Force Base should be intercepted by a “kill vehicle” launched 20 minutes later. Debris from the impact should disintegrate over the ocean.

Sources: Department of Defense, Associated Press