WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Defense Department shot down a mock warhead over the Pacific Ocean late on Saturday in a successful test of a controversial anti-ballistic missile defense.
``The kill-intercept was confirmed by all our sensors,'' Air Force Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish, head of the Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, told a news briefing.
But the results would take up to two months to analyze fully and ``in all probability'' some of the test's objectives were unmet, he said.
Kadish termed it ``one step on a journey'' toward building a multilayered shield against missiles that could be tipped with nuclear, chemical or biological warheads.
Two out of the three previous such $100 million flight tests had failed, most recently just over a year ago, on July 8. Under President Bush's stepped-up testing program, the next one is scheduled for October and may be more complex, Kadish said.
Saturday's test kicked off at 10:40 p.m. EDT -- delayed briefly by Greenpeace protesters -- with a Minuteman 2 intercontinental ballistic missile streaking into the night sky on a fiery plume from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
Twenty-one minutes and 34 seconds later, an interceptor lifted off from Kwajalein Atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, 4,800 miles away.The target was intercepted 140 miles above the central Pacific, outside the earth's atmosphere, at a combined closing speed of about 16,000 mph.
Sensors aboard a 120-pound ``kill vehicle'' selected the target instead of a large, black mylar balloon, its temperature matching that of the dummy warhead to function as a decoy.
As the vaporized target flashed on closed-circuit video monitors, military and civilian program managers could be seen jumping for joy and slapping each other on the back in the Kwajalein control room.
But opponents of missile defense said the interception was a baby step that should not be construed as proving the maturity of missile-defense technology.
``This test was as easy as it gets,'' said Tom Collina, director of the Union of Concerned Scientists' global security program.
Four protesters -- three Americans and one from the United Kingdom -- were arrested in the waters off Vandenberg Air Force Base, Carol Gregory of Greenpeace told Reuters.
Greenpeace said Bush's program ``poses one of the single greatest threats to the world and will lead to a new nuclear arms race.''
``As countries race to counter the Bush proposed shield with weapons of mass destruction, the U.S. will be responsible for single-handedly destroying treaties of peace and arms control and creating a proliferation dynamic that will put us all at great risk,'' it said in a statement.
Bush, citing what he calls a growing missile threat from countries like North Korea, Iraq and Iran, is eager to deploy a multilayered shield including missiles launched from ships and lasers fired from modified Boeing 747 aircraft.
The latest test, a rerun of the three previous tests, took place only three days after the administration told Congress that its missile-defense speedup plan would collide with the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty within months.
The treaty made with the former Soviet Union bars nationwide defenses against long-range missiles and certain kinds of anti-missile testing to head off a race to overwhelm each side's defenses.
Boeing Co. is the lead system integrator for U.S. missile defense. TRW Inc. builds the battle command, control and communications system. Raytheon builds the ``exoatmospheric kill vehicle'' and Lockheed Martin Corp. is prime contractor on the interceptor's current booster system.
The first flight test, on October 3, 1999, resulted in the only other successful intercept of a ballistic missile target. The next one, on January 19, 2000, failed due to a clogged cooling pipe on the kill vehicle. The third one, July 8 last year, flopped when the kill vehicle failed to separate from its booster rocket.
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