US Missile Defense Under Fire Despite Successful Test

A nationwide movement to oppose the hyped-up missile defense program is getting strong momentum in the United States despite the US military's successful weekend test of a missile intercept, the first bullet-to-bullet test since the Bush administration took office in January this year.

"The Bush administration's announced plan for missile defense lacks clarity in several important respects," said The Washington Post in an editorial soon after the missile test in which a rocket-launched interceptor hit and destroyed a mock war-head flying 140 miles above the Pacific.

The Washington Post expressed worry that the Bush administration would deploy a missile shield before meeting "two of the most important conditions for success," with one relating to the maturity of the technology and the other to diplomatic efforts with Russia and other nations to ensure that the deployment would increase global stability.

"Many experts, including a panel commissioned by the Pentagon last year, say that fundamental technical problems remain with all of the various missile defense systems. Even the ground-based system, which passed a preliminary test Saturday...has not yet overcome the problems of how to discriminate between incoming missiles and decoys," the newspaper said.

The Los Angeles Times, in an editorial entitled "Misguided Missile Plan" on Tuesday, also cast doubt about the technical feasibility of the anti-missile "kill vehicle" in a real war, especially about its capability of countering any multi-warhead attack.

"What has yet to be shown is that it's possible to defend against an attack by multiple warheads accompanied by realist decoys designed to draw the kill vehicle away from its real targets. It would be folly not to anticipate just such an attack, whether from a rogue state or a major power," The Los Angeles Times said.

Philip Coyle, former director of the Operational Testing and Evaluation for the Pentagon, also criticized the missile defense tests for lacking "operational realism." A successful intercept during any future flight test, he emphasized, should be viewed in the context of built-in "limitations."

Among those limitations, Coyle said, is the reduction in the number of decoys used in testing from nine to one. Coyle and many other critics have been accusing the Pentagon of "carefully scripting the tests to increase the chances for a successful intercept."

Coyle was echoed by quite a few politicians. Senator Joseph Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, stressed that Saturday's test is "not a real-world test yet." "We have a long way to go," he added.

Lieutenant General Ronald Kadish, director of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, has conceded that scientists would need "weeks or even months" to finish analyzing Saturday's test results. "We do not know for certain that every objective was met, " and "in all probability, some of them were not," he said.

Analysts and politicians lambasted the missile test as a " political show" by the Republicans who want to use it to justify a bid for a 57 percent increase in missile defense during the next year to 8.3 billion U.S. dollars. The critics dismissed the missile defense program as a "fiscal black hole" which would siphon off American tax-payers 500 billion to one trillion dollars in years ahead.

"We have spent five times the money, in inflation-adjusted dollars on missile defense since 1950, that we spent on the entire Manhattan Project that produced the atomic bomb during wartime," said analyst Alan Kligerman at a news conference recently sponsored by Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities, a nonprofit organization whose members include some 600 CEOs and which opposes missile defense as wasteful of tax dollars and damaging to the U.S. economy.

"Why are we falling into this pit? Why do we risk ruining this country in the name of saving it? The reason is, for the profits of a very small number of some very large companies: the Defense Contractors. And for the continued ability of some Members of Congress to receive very large campaign contributions from those contractors. And for the ability of the Pentagon to ever further expand on the only thing it knows: old fashioned, huge scale, global, nuclear war," Kligerman said.

"We are building an arms empire, aimed at dominating the world, that is ruinously costly and inappropriate to the threats at hand, " he said.

Senator Carl Levin, the new chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has said that the Democrats will try to eliminate funds for any defense activity that might violate the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty -- another Gordian Knot in the way towards further tests and deployment of the ambitious missile shield.

Many politicians and analysts here view the ABM treaty as the cornerstone of the arms control regime that has been in place since the Nixon administration.

"If we abrogate the treaty, we are abdicating our leadership on nuclear weapons policy and giving the green light for a new arms race," said Chris Madison, director of the missile defense campaign at the Council for a Livable World Education Fund.

Madison insisted that the ABM treaty is not a relic as President Bush once called, but "a global obligation" the United States should not abandon lightly. "We should talk to the Russians about reducing our weapons stockpiles, not about violating the ABM treaty. We should talk to the Koreans about ending their missile program, not rushing to build a system to shoot down their missiles," he said.

Experts also warned that the development of missile defense would inevitably lead to a new round of arms race into the space, bringing about more danger rather than security to the United States and the world as a whole.

"Testing of the National Missile Defense (NMD) program is just the beginning of aerospace corporation, U.S. government and Pentagon efforts to move the arms race into space," said a news release published here recently by the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space.

"The Cold War may be over on earth, but President Bush and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld seem determined to create a new battlefield in space," said Retired Rear Admiral Eugene Carroll of the Center for Defense Information. Carrol is the first naval officer to serve as director of all military operations for all U. S. forces in Europe and the Middle East.

Carroll told reporters recently that the Bush administration's preparations to create an expanded missile defense system with U.S. space-based laser battle stations is "a costly venture leading to the weaponization of space, a step which will make all Americans less secure in the future."

Last month, a group of anti-missile-defense organizations across the United States put out mass rallies in Washington D.C. and sent petitions to Congress calling for a halt to the development of the "white elephant system" which they consider will destabilize the world, undermine America's national interests and cost American people a better life.

Greenpeace activists, along with a coalition of nuclear disarmament groups, student activists and the public, staged a demonstration last Saturday at the front gate of Vanderberg Air force Base in Lompoc, CA, where the dummy warhead was sent to space only to be shot down by the "kill vehicle" launched from Kwajalein atoll in the South Pacific. Over the weekend, a Stop Wars protest was also held in Washington D.C., and students from across the country held a candlelight vigil to protest the missile test.

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