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by Jim Mannion WASHINGTON (AFP) - The Pentagon may delay the next test of the National Missile Defense system until 2001, U.S. defense officials said Friday, as President Bill Clinton's decision to halt the system deployment raised doubts about the program's future.
The next test in the program - an attempt to shoot down an incoming enemy missile with a 'friendly' missile - had originally been scheduled for October or November, but was pushed back to December following the failure of a similar test on July 8. Now the next test may be held later than December, a spokesperson for the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization said. "The main stumbling block of having the test in December is that the range is closed for a good part of the month for holidays. That's not to say that it won't happen in December," said Lieutenant Colonel Rick Lehner. "We're still doing the failure analysis of the last test. Until that's completed, General [Willie] Nance is not going to set a test date," he said, referring to the officer in charge of the program. U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen said the Pentagon would press ahead with an aggressive program of developmental testing despite Clinton's decision to leave to his successor the question of whether to move ahead with deployment of an NMD system. But Pentagon officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, conceded that with a new administration coming into office in January the program could face fundamental changes in approach. "The whole complexion could change," said one official. "This administration is committed to a hit-to-kill technology. But who's to say that the new administration isn't going to come in and say hit-to-kill is too hard." Neither Vice President Al Gore nor Texas Governor George Bush have said precisely what they intend to do with the NMD if elected, although they have staked out broadly different positions. Gore, the Democratic candidate, said Friday he would continue testing the system to see if it would work, but would oppose systems that would unnecessarily alter the strategic balance or encourage an arms race with Russia or China. Republican candidate Bush, who said Friday he intended to deploy an effective system "at the earliest possible date," has advocated a more robust NMD system than the 100-interceptor system now envisioned by the Pentagon. Theodore Postol, an MIT professor who has attacked the proposed NMD system as a technological impossibility, called Friday for an independent review of the entire program by a panel of scientists. "I think if the program is reviewed properly it will certainly have to go in another direction because the basic science issues are so straightforward than any review will find this system fundamentally flawed," he said. Postol argues that the existing system can never work because sensors on the interceptor's "kill vehicle" which is supposed to collide with an incoming enemy warhead in mid trajectory - cannot distinguish between a warhead and decoys in the vacuum of space. Postol, however, believes the technology exists to develop a missile defense system using "boost phase" interceptors. Such a system would avoid the decoy problem by intercepting a missile shortly after launch as it is firing into space. "The analysis I've done shows that there's no serious technology that is critical to the performance of the system that we don't already have in hand, and there are no simple countermeasures, given the kind of adversaries we are postulating," he said. |
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