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China-Japan-Koreas

Pentagon report: 'Limited capability' to thwart N. Korean missile

2005-01-23

President Bush's fledgling missile defense system should provide a limited capability to thwart a North Korean missile attack, the Pentagon's top weapons tester said in a report made available Wednesday.

Oh. Well. If it's not 100 percent effective we shouldn't have it, right?

A system "testbed" put together by Boeing Co. "should have some limited capability to defend against a threat missile from North Korea," Thomas Christie, the Pentagon's director of operational testing, said in his annual report to Congress on top U.S. weapon programs. "Ground testing has improved our confidence that military operators could exploit any inherent capability that may exist in the testbed, if needed in an emergency," he wrote. He said it was not possible to estimate the system's capability with "high confidence" because of a lack of flight testing of the Pentagon's costliest weapons program. But Philip Coyle, Christie's predecessor as the Pentagon's top weapons tester and now an adviser to the private Center for Defense Information, said it was not even possible to estimate with "low confidence." The interceptor missiles "have no demonstrated capability to defend against a real attack because they have only been tested with artificial targeting aids, with location beacons onboard the target and with advance information about the attack that no enemy would provide," Coyle said by email. Since October 1999, the interceptors have hit their targets in five of eight highly scripted flight tests.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delayed a decision to put the system on alert. Bush had initially planned to do so by the end of last month. The first eight interceptor rockets were installed in silos last year -- six at Fort Greely, Alaska, and two at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Christie's analysis preceded the December 15 test failure of what was to have been the first full flight test of the interceptor, designed to deliver a "kill vehicle" that collides with enemy warheads to pulverize them. Last week, the head of the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency, Lt. Gen. Henry Obering, blamed the failure on a "very minor" software glitch that he said could be easily fixed.

The Pentagon plans to spend roughly $10 billion a year for the next six years on a restructured drive to protect against ballistic missiles carrying warheads that could be tipped with chemical, nuclear or biological warheads. Christie said tests so far had demonstrated the system's "basic functionality." Boeing is the prime contractor for the ground-based leg designed to knock out warheads in space. Northrop Grumman Corp. handles the command-and-control system. Raytheon Co. builds the kill vehicle. Lockheed Martin Corp. and Orbital Sciences Corp. make the booster rockets.

Posted by:tipper

#8 The Claremont Institute's MissileThreat.com provides an excellent overview of the subject, with regular updates.

Posted by: Atomic Conspiracy 2005-01-23 6:25:01 PM

#7 Incidentally, I strongly suspect that some of Israel's Arrow interceptors have nuclear warheads, making them effective against a much larger range of enemy missiles, including any that Iran is likely to have in the foreseeable future.

Posted by: Atomic Conspiracy 2005-01-23 6:17:38 PM

#6 NK has to only *believe* their strike might not make it through, then armageddon reigns down on them. I wouldn't like their odds

Posted by: Frank G 2005-01-23 6:00:39 PM

#5 Early missile defense:

Nike Zeus (1958-1961)
Nike X (1961-1967)
Sentinal (1967-1969)
Safeguard (1969-1976)

Additionally, the nuclear warhead version of the Nike Hercules was operational at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Though intended for use against nuclear-armed bombers, it had higher flight performance than the current Patriot and was believed to have a capability against IRBMs (like those deployed in Cuba) and first-generation SLBMs.

In recent years, there have been several Michael Moore style pop-culture "exposes" on the nuclear Nike program, all of which tacitly assume every LLL myth about nuclear weapons and then some. For example, they go out of their way to pretend that the weapons were absurd, as dangerous as the ones they were meant to stop, and even (in the case of a documentary about Nike sites in Chicago) to pretend that there was a substantial contamination danger from the sites themselves.

It appears that hostile media-cult propagandists want to pre-empt any revival of the idea, lest it prove wholly workable and their allies' ability to hold the American people hostage be mitigated.

Posted by: Atomic Conspiracy 2005-01-23 5:56:54 PM

#4 This vehicle would go from marginal to nearly complete effectiveness with one small change: a proximity-fused nuclear warhead.
Both advocates and opponents commonly don't realize that ICBM defense was extensively researched in the 50s and 60s, leading to the briefly operational Safeguard system in 1974. It had been taken for granted from the beginning that exploding a nuke in space or the high atmosphere was justified to keep one from exploding in a city or a vital military installation.
The long technical and political struggle to develop a new ABM system is based entirely on the difficulties of doing it without resort to nuclear explosives. Safeguard used stone-age electronics, but there was little doubt of its effectiveness.

Posted by: Atomic Conspiracy 2005-01-23 5:28:39 PM

#3 So, how's the Airborne Laser project coming along?

Posted by: Bomb-a-rama 2005-01-23 3:20:11 PM

#2 It's way too late to undo a lot of the damage Bubba did to the strategic defense program, especially after wrecking DoD's RLV projects.

The only choice we have left to us is a bad system or no system at all.

Posted by: Phil Fraering 2005-01-23 10:48:56 AM

#1 The strategy here is an interesting one. While the Norks may want to have a missile that can hit the US, that is no end in itself. They would want a missile that can attack Skor and US forces in the South, a US fleet, or Japan. But this requires a scenario for their almost singular interest: the conquest of the South. So such a weapon could only be useable in one of two situations: either as part of a complex and integrated invasion; or, as a complete wild hare of a madman.

The third possibility, and one hardly considered, is if the Norks launch against China. This could accomplish several things, from the Nork point of view. First of all, they might think it would free them from Chinese domination, much like the Vietnamese fought a war (and did rather well) to send China a message. It could also severely cripple the Chinese military, if used during a multi-Corps concentration of a military exercise. Or they could launch against Beijing, decapitating China and perhaps reducing it to a military junta of competing warlords.

Posted by: Anonymoose 2005-01-23 10:48:06 AM

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