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Daschle: Rushing to Deploy Missile Shield Could Embarrass US
New US Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle said Friday that rushing too quickly to build a missile defense system could be an embarrassment to the United States.
"There is such a rush to deploy that I think it's going to be an embarrassment to them, to the country, if we rush to judgment, rush to the commitment of resources," Daschle said.
Daschle, who assumed his new role Wednesday, made the comment when responding to questions about a report in the Washington Post Friday that the Bush administration is considering a crash effort to put into place a rudimentary missile defense system before the end of President George Bush's current term in 2004.
Daschle said he was "mystified" by the Republican leadership's apparent haste to commit tens of billions of dollars to the initiative.
Meanwhile, spokesman for the US Defense Department's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization Rick Lehner said Friday the United States plans to conduct the fourth test of a planned missile defense system by the end of next month.
This will be the first Bush administration flight test of the controversial multibillion US dollar ballistic missile defense.
Two of three US missile defense tests have failed to prove the system would work, most recently on July 8 last year when an attempt to intercept and destroy a dummy warhead in space failed because the weapon did not separate from the second stage of its liftoff rocket.
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