Heavy Pressure on U.S. Missile Defense Test

July 11 -- Sometime late Saturday night, a Minuteman II intercontinental ballistic missile carrying a mock warhead and single decoy will lift off a launch pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, and race across the Pacific.

About 20 minutes after this simulated target missile is launched, there will be another launch about 4,800 miles away. A prototype interceptor missile of the Bush administration's proposed missile defense system will launch from the Ronald Reagan Missile Test Facility at Kwajalein Atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands and head eastward.

If all goes according to plan, about 10 minutes into the flight, a "kill vehicle," having separated from the interceptor missile, will collide with the target approximately 140 miles above the central Pacific Ocean about halfway through the target missile's flight.

Pressure for an Intercept

The $100 million test flight is one of the most controversial in the long-standing effort to build a missile defense system to protect the United States from ballistic missile attack or an accidental launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile.

Bush administration officials have favored deploying the system as soon as technologically feasible. President Clinton delayed the deployment decision last year after a previous, failed test.

A controversial report prepared last year by the Pentagon's chief test evaluator found the system's effectiveness not at all proved, and said it was too soon to predict when the system could enter service.

The report also said testing of the system so far has been simplified, and controlled, in that the system was provided advanced information about the target that would be unavailable during a real attack. The report was recently released by a congressional committee despite Pentagon efforts to keep it confidential.

This is the first major ballistic missile defense test since President Bush took office. Two previous attempts to achieve an intercept failed — and there is tremendous pressure this time to have a successful test.