Posted on: Thursday, June 13, 2002

U.S. to pull out of missile treaty today

Advertiser staff and news services

The Pentagon is wasting no time consigning the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Defense Treaty to the dustbin of history, pushing ahead with plans to test and deploy a multibillion-dollar missile-defense system the treaty prohibited.

The United States is set to pull out of the treaty today, and on Saturday workers will break ground on a test site at Fort Greely, Alaska. The test site could not have gone forward under the treaty.

Also today, in waters off Kaua'i, the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency plans to test a sea-launched interceptor designed to destroy incoming missiles midway through their flight and 100 miles above the Earth.

The test would have been allowed under the ABM Treaty, and its timing was coincidental, officials said.

Still, today's test is important because interceptors fired from ships will play a significant role in the limited national missile-defense system that the Bush administration hopes to put into place by 2008.

The developments come after a Pentagon decision to classify as secret information about the targets and decoys used in future tests of ground-based interceptors.

Defense officials say the secrecy is necessary to prevent adversaries from learning how to defeat these interceptors, which are further along in their testing than a ship-based defense system. But critics in the scientific community and in Congress say the secrecy will make it harder to conduct outside review and oversight.

The missile-defense program has been plagued by questions about its effectiveness and feasibility. Some experts contend the system envisioned by Bush will cost more than $200 billion.

The 1972 ABM treaty served as a centerpiece of successful nuclear arms control between the United States and the former Soviet Union for 30 years. It is the first major arms control agreement the United States has pulled out of. The treaty banned the adversaries from building a system to defend against attack from nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles.

It was aimed at reducing the danger of nuclear war by denying each side the ability to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike without risking massive retaliation.

The Navy hopes to ram a target missile in mid-flight off Kaua'i today using anti-ballistic missile technology aboard the Aegis guided missile cruiser USS Lake Erie.

The target rocket, to be fired from the Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kaua'i, is a 32-foot-tall Aries single-stage rocket.

Within minutes of the Aries launch, the Lake Erie will launch a Standard Missile-3, which is designed to chase down and hit the target rocket in flight. The ship's missile has its own infrared guidance system and uses a kinetic warhead, meaning that instead of exploding, it destroys the target by the sheer force of its impact.

Today's test is similar to one conducted Jan. 25. In that test, also involving a target from Kaua'i and an interceptor from the Lake Erie, the goal was to test the guidance, navigation and control systems aboard the Standard Missile-3.

Hitting the Aries rocket was not one of the goals of that test — although the test warhead did.

This time, the goal is to smash into the Aries, proving that the combination of ship- and missile-based systems can spot, follow, chase and knock down an enemy missile.

Staff writer Jan TenBruggencate contributed to this report.