The Raytheon Co. warhead at the heart of the planned U.S. missile defense won’t be ready by
the Bush administration’s target date of October 2004, the Pentagon’s independent weapons tester says.
The weapon won’t have the testing necessary to prove it can
intercept an enemy ballistic missile hidden by sophisticated
decoys, Thomas Christie says in new assessment.
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In tests to date, the warhead has been programmed with its target’s characteristics. There’s insufficient time for the more
challenging tests that can “provide a higher degree of
confidence” that the system will work as an “emergency
defense,” Christie wrote.
The Bush administration says it’s still counting on the
warhead to provide as of Oct. 1, 2004 a rudimentary capability to
intercept a ballistic missile fired from North Korea with little
or no warning.
The plan is to have six interceptors at Fort
Greeley, Alaska and four at Vandenberg Air Force Base, 150 miles
north of Los Angeles.
The warhead has hit its target in five of eight tests since 1999.
The “enemy” missile’s characteristics — such as general trajectory and heat image — were known and simple decoys accompanied it. The Pentagon says it plans to toughen the tests by
gradually excluding much of this advance knowledge and making the
decoys trickier.
Christie’s report underscores how limited the warhead’s
capability will be by late next year. It implies the deployment
schedule is unrealistic while praising the Pentagon’s long-range
test plan.
The U.S. Missile Defense Agency acknowledged the program
needs more complex tests and says it will also use computer
modeling and simulation to refine the warhead’s performance
against incoming missiles. “Staying ahead of the current and future threat is a
challenge for any weapon system,” Ballistic Missile Defense
Agency spokesman Air Force Lt. Colonel Richard Lehner said of
Christie’s report. “We are confident that future flight tests
will validate what we’ve learned through our modeling and
simulation efforts.”
Congress was given a more detailed, classified version of
Christie’s report. Arms control groups and skeptics in Congress
will likely use the unclassified version to argue that the
administration can’t achieve its target date of 2004 and should
delay it pending additional test results.
The Raytheon warhead is part of a ground-based network of sensors, radar, interceptors and communications managed by the
Boeing Co. under a $6.4 billion, five-year contract. Raytheon was
tapped in 1998 to build the warheads; it does that at its Tucson,
Arizona facility. Sales to date total about $500 million.
The system by next year will likely make more progress, Christie wrote. A “key exception” will be demonstrating the
warhead’s performance when it doesn’t know its target’s
characteristics or if that target tumbles unexpectedly in flight
as an actual missile might, Christie wrote.
Bloomberg News
