Dave Eberhart, NewsMax.com
Tuesday, April 16, 2002

"It is becoming increasingly clear and we are becoming increasingly confident that we will be able to make hit-to-kill work reliably enough to be effective,” said Air Force Lt. Gen. Ronald T. Kadish, chief of the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency.

Pentagon officials said work would begin this summer on the missile defense base at Fort Greely, near Fairbanks. The prototype site would be home to five missile interceptors.

"Once you have that built, then there’s an inherent capability there for whatever use the country might need of it at the time,” said Kadish, indicating that the site would have a role in missile defense as well as testing.

Originally stymied by a string of failures, the Pentagon to date has spent more than $60 billion on anti-missile technology without fielding a working system. But with four recent consecutive direct hits by prototype interceptors on incoming missile targets, confidence soared that the touted non-nuclear hit-to-kill system can work.

Not all experts, however, agree on the significance of the hit-to-kill successes. Philip E. Coyle, former director of Operational Test & Evaluation at the Pentagon, and current senior adviser at the Center for Defense Information, went on record last month saying that such "boost-phase” interceptors were being hyped unrealistically.

'You Have to Invade China First'

"This is because China is simply too big of a country, and you just can’t get interceptors close enough to enable them to hit the Chinese ICBMs in the boost phase - you have to invade China first. And so by the time the U.S. interceptors could get to the middle of China, their Chinese missiles would be long gone. You can see this just with high school physics and geometry and geography …

"You might say, ‘Well, what harm is it if we can only build a boost-phase intercept system that only works against North Korea, let’s say, or other small - relatively small - countries?’ But the problem is that some members of Congress think that the Missile Defense Agency funds are going to produce a boost-phase interceptor defense against China, which it won’t.”

Never blind to basic physics, the Pentagon in the mid-1970s briefly deployed "Safeguard,” an anti-missile system that relied on powerful nuclear-tipped interceptors. Recently, Rumsfeld indicated that he had renewed interest in such a program.

Hit-to-kill technology destroys its target by simply crashing into it.

"Sometimes brute force can be useful,” Gen. Kadish said when commenting on the nuclear alternative. "We don’t rule out anything long-term,” he added, after indicating that the nuclear alternative was for the time being on hold.

Concerns

But just as in the '70s, the vision of a shielding cloud of nuclear explosions high overhead to block incoming missiles remains unsettling for many people. A key criticism: the resulting ionized clouds and electromagnetic shock waves of the explosions might blind radar on the ground and scramble electronic equipment.

Hit-to-kill success aside, the Pentagon continues to inject billions of dollars into an array of alternatives to a missile shield. The current Nuclear Posture Review says that any eventual missile shield system might include lasers aboard Boeing 747, ground-based interceptors in Alaska, and interceptors fired from ships.

Meanwhile, the Navy is racing to develop a ship-launched interceptor swift enough to catch a ballistic missile, while an initial test of the airborne laser is targeted for sometime in 2003.

Other projects on the drawing board include "Brilliant Pebbles,” a system of about 1,000 miniature satellites that float around the Earth in a cocoon that get a wake-up call when the enemy is about to launch a missile.

They start looking for any missile that might have been launched. After detecting, they rain down from above and slam into the enemy missile.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:

Bush Administration

Missile Defense

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