Interceptor Scores a Direct Hit on Missile
By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 15, 2001; Page A01
A projectile launched from a prototype missile defense system on the Marshall Islands successfully intercepted a dummy warhead last night high above the Pacific Ocean, scoring an important victory for the Bush administration's ambitious new missile defense plan.
After two straight failures in similar tests, the projectile's sensors, computer and thrusters identified and destroyed the mock warhead, which had been launched 29 minutes earlier from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
The direct hit – compared by scientists to "a bullet hitting a bullet" – took place 144 miles in space at 11:09 p.m. At impact, the projectile, also known as the "kill vehicle," and the dummy warhead were traveling at 4.5 miles per second – five to 10 times faster than a tank round.
A video of the intercept, broadcast at the Pentagon, showed a blinding flash of light in space before the screen went black.
Military personnel and dozens of scientists from Boeing and other defense contractors erupted in applause at mission control on an island in the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
While Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and other top Bush administration officials have sought to play down the significance of the test, the stakes were enormous.
Missile defense experts inside and outside of government say the successful interceptor will provide badly needed momentum to the government's efforts at erecting a prototype missile shield just as the Bush administration begins lobbying for its initiative.
The Bush plan calls for $8 billion in funding for missile defense in fiscal 2002, a 57 percent increase. About half of $3 billion in proposed new spending would go toward the system that accomplished last night's intercept.
"To hit a ballistic missile with an interceptor under any circumstances is a very impressive technological feat," Robert Sherman, director of the Federation of American Scientists' strategic security project, said in an interview shortly after completion of the test.
"But the question is how are they moving on the path to be able to protect the American people against a ballistic missile attack," Sherman said. "They've got a very, very long way to go."
Minutes before the dummy warhead was initially scheduled to be launched from Vandenberg at 10 p.m., two divers from the environmental group Greenpeace swam ashore within a security zone at the air base, forcing a hold on the count down, Greenpeace spokeswoman Carol Gregory said.
Gregory also said in a telephone interview from the front gate of Vandenberg that Greenpeace had three inflatable boats in the security zone that were still being pursued by authorities late last night.
Previously, the kill vehicle scored a direct hit in its first test in October 1999, although the intercept was aided by a beacon linked to the Global Positioning System satellite network. A second test without the beacon malfunctioned in January 2000 when the kill vehicle's cooling system clogged and it missed its target by 200 feet. In a third test a year ago, the kill vehicle never separated from the missile booster, a failure that short-circuited the experiment and kept the kill vehicle's sensors from ever deploying.
"We never got a chance to do it last year," said Air Force Lt. Gen. Ronald T. Kadish, director of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization. "Everything is basically the same."
Kadish acknowledged that the test, involving just one dummy warhead and one decoy, falls far short of simulating a real attack, which could conceivably involve multiple warheads and dozens of balloon decoys.
But Kadish said that the test, although basic, is "operationally realistic in the sense that we've got these things in flight" and the kill vehicle must discriminate between them.
Tom Collina, director of global security for the Union of Concerned Scientists, called the test "rudimentary" as a simulation of real threat conditions and questioned whether it really tests the kill vehicle's ability to discriminate between objects.
The kill vehicle's computers, Collina said, have been programmed in advance with the infrared signatures of both the dummy warhead and the decoy – signatures it would not know in a real attack.
"They're simply testing the ability of the seeker to say, 'I'm looking for an object with this characteristic. It's not this one, so I'll go after that one,' " Collina said.
Collina said it is important to understand what the test actually represents so it can be put in perspective. "This may be a fine test for early development, but you can't have it both ways," Collina said. "It's fine for what it is. But it's not telling you what will work in the real world."
Lt. Col. Rick Lehner, a spokesman for the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, said that the kill vehicle's computer system "needs to know what it is going after."
But he said its ability to discriminate one object from another in space is far more complex than simply having been programmed with the infrared signatures of what it is looking for. "This [kill vehicle], with its infrared sensor and its visible light sensor and its computer," Lehner said, "knows how to discriminate" between objects using highly sophisticated – and highly classified – computer algorithms.
"Say what you will, this is a major victory for the Bush administration," said one senior Defense Department official.
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