Military intercepts mock enemy warhead

WASHINGTON — The U.S. military successfully shot down a target missile using its long-range missile-defense system Friday, the first time such a test has intercepted a mock enemy warhead since 2002, officials said.

The 54-foot interceptor shot out of an underground silo at Vandenberg Air Force Base on the Central California coast at 10:39 a.m., 17 minutes after the mock warhead was launched from Kodiak Island, Alaska, said Missile Defense Agency spokesman Rick Lehner.

The interceptor carried a refrigerator-size "kill vehicle" that locked on to the approaching mock enemy missile and flew into the 4-foot-long warhead at 18,000 mph.

Lehner said both disintegrated more than 100 miles above the Earth and a few hundred miles west of Vandenberg. The interceptor's flight lasted 13 minutes.

The $85 million test was designed to see whether the "kill vehicle" could get close to the warhead to test the tracking and sensor systems that would be used in an actual missile attack.

Boeing is prime contractor for what is formally known as the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense system. Major subcontractors include Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and Orbital Sciences.

Pentagon officials hailed the test as a major step forward for the nation's "shield" against incoming ballistic missiles, saying it vindicates their confidence in the military's ability to thwart an overseas launch of a missile carrying weapons of mass destruction.

But experts cautioned that the test lacked some real-world conditions, such as enemy efforts to defeat the missile-defense system, a surprise attack and an attack involving multiple missiles.

The test was a "total success," Lt. Gen. Henry Obering, the agency director, said at a Pentagon news conference. He said the United States had tried to mimic North Korea's Taepodong-2 missile and intercepted the target even though the goal of the exercise was simply to gather data.

"This is about as close as we can come to an end-to-end test of our long-range missile defense system," Obering said.

Stephen Young, a senior analyst for the Union of Concerned Scientists, a group that advocates curbing the spread of nuclear weapons, said the demonstration was far from replicating an actual attack.

"They know the when, the where, the what [of the target missile] ... where it's coming from, the size of the warhead," he said by phone from Maryland. In a real attack, that would be unlikely.

The test launch was postponed from Thursday after fog socked in Kodiak Island.

More than $100 billion has been spent on the nation's missile-defense system since 1983 and it has been the subject of criticism by those who call it a costly boondoggle.

Anthony Cordesman, a defense expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the successful test is a step forward but the military is a long way away from having a working anti-missile system.

"It's important to have the test, but you need a frequency and a level of testing that proves you can do this reliably," Cordesman said. "Is this a milestone of a kind? Yes. Does it prove we have a mature, ready system? No way."

The U.S. military moved ships off the coast of North Korea to detect missile launches in late June, preparing the missile-defense system in case it needed to intercept one.

North Korea launched six missiles July 4 — including one test Taepodong-2 — but they failed seconds after takeoff and did not pose a threat to the United States.