news.com.au, THE US national missile defence program suffered a major setback yesterday with the forced shutdown of the first test flight of a high-speed interceptor missile.
The failure raises questions about the reliability of the seven multi-million-dollar interceptor missiles already loaded into underground silos in California and Alaska.
The shutdown also makes it unlikely US President George W.Bush will meet a 2002 pledge to have the first components of a national missile-defence system operational by the end of this year.
The system, which includes Australian involvement, is intended to counter missile attacks by North Korea or other potential adversaries.
The Bush administration has put more than $US15billion ($20 billion) into the program over the past four years. Critics say the system is not technologically feasible and it is being driven by politics rather than defence. They argue that attackers are more likely to smuggle a nuclear, biological or chemical warhead into the US than to risk devastating retaliation by firing missiles whose launch can be immediately detected by US early-warning satellites.
The Pentagon's Missile Defence Agency said yesterday the test flight was aborted by an “unknown anomaly” as the interceptor missile was about to be fired from Kwajalein, an atoll in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean.
The missile was carrying a “kill vehicle”, and was to have released it at a a target warhead sent into outer space about 16 minutes earlier from Kodiak Island, Alaska. The single failed test cost $US85million.
