ROCKET SCIENCE

	June 4,1999
	Both houses of Congress have voted to deploy a missile defense system as soon as technologically feasible and the President is expected to sign the bill within days. Correspondent Jeffrey Kaye of KCET, Los Angeles, reports on the technological challenge ahead.

JEFFREY KAYE: Deep inside Colorado's Cheyenne Mountain, military staff at NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, scan the globe for missile launches. Using radar, satellites, and other sensors, NORAD personnel track missiles launched from just about anywhere in the world. Visitors to NORAD see video of a disturbing exercise. SPOKESMAN: Intel reports a probably launch of five ICBM's from China. JEFFREY KAYE: Computers track fictional ICBM's, Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, as they arc through space -- SPOKESMAN: Intel assesses this to be combat against North America. JEFFREY KAYE: -- and slam unimpeded into North America. Navy Captain Ron Nasman is Cheyenne Mountain's director of current operations. I asked him a question he says he often gets after visitors watch the simulation. JEFFREY KAYE: But once you know that a missile is on its way to the United States, what can you do about it? CAPTAIN RON NASMAN: Right now, all we can do is provide warning. We have no capability to shoot down any strategic missiles coming into North America. JEFFREY KAYE: That same message reportedly resonated with Ronald Reagan in 1979, when as a Presidential candidate, he visited NORAD. Four years later, from the White House, President Reagan announced an ambitious project. PRESIDENT REAGAN: What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies? JEFFREY KAYE: President Reagan's strategic defense initiative, often referred to as star wars, envisioned space-based lasers that would shoot down incoming missiles. Succeeding Presidents scaled back the research and development program. Sixteen years and more than $50 billion after President Reagan's announcement, the Clinton administration is developing a more modest, ground-based national missile defense system. WILLIAM COHEN: We are committing additional billions of dollars and taking other steps to protect our troops and the American people from the growing threat posed by weapons of mass destruction delivered by ballistic missiles. JEFFREY KAYE: The administration says increased missile threats from nations such as North Korea and Iran make deployment necessary by the year 2005. SPOKESMAN: We have no defense today against any missile system. JEFFREY KAYE: In March, the House and Senate voted to make a national missile defense program a national priority, but critics question whether it will ever work. REP. DENNIS KUCINICH, (D) Ohio: This has about as much chance of repelling raindrops as the real thing would have in stopping nuclear missiles, if the scientific evidence is to be believed. JEFFREY KAYE: Air Force General Lester Lyles directed the Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization for two and a half years until his promotion last month. GENERAL LESTER LYLES: I have great confidence that we can do this and that our national security can be supported by these kinds of technologies. JEFFREY KAYE: Current plans encompass an $11 billion system to counter a small-scale attack on the U.S. . GENERAL LESTER LYLES: Our national missile defense program is designed to develop a system to protect us against limited potential attacks from a rogue nation, or have some residual capabilities to counter an accidental or unauthorized launch from one of the current nuclear powers. JEFFREY KAYE: Boeing is the major contractor responsible for testing and developing the national missile defense system. The system would be designed to knock down enemy missiles above the atmosphere. Satellites and radar would detect and track incoming missiles. Commanders at Cheyenne Mountain would be alerted to an attack. They could launch interceptor missiles from sites in either North Dakota or Alaska. Onboard sensors would guide the interceptors to smash into enemy warheads, destroying them in so-called hit-to-kill collisions in space. GENERAL LESTER LYLES: We're not talking about a blast fragmentation warhead to blow up a particular threat. We're talking about body-to-body impact, hitting a bullet with a bullet, kinetic energy impact, in order to completely destroy whatever that warhead might be. JEFFREY KAYE: But Philip Coyle, the Defense Department's in-house testing watchdog, says the often-used hitting a bullet with a bullet analogy actually understates the difficulty of the problem. PHILIP COYLE: Bullets go about 1,700 miles an hour. The closing velocities in national missile defense can be 10 or 20 times higher than that, say 17,000 miles an hour. So the hit-to-kill part is going to be very difficult. And showing that that works, I think is going to be one of the greatest challenges. JEFFREY KAYE: At the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, scientist Theodore Postal of MIT elaborated on the challenge of actually hitting an enemy warhead in space. THEODORE POSTAL: You'd have to hit within 20 or 30 or 40 centimeters of a chosen aim point. JEFFREY KAYE: That means hitting the right object instead of decoys that might accompany enemy missiles to fool U.S. interceptors. This rendering, which he provided, shows a warhead surrounded by decoys. In space, says Postal, the interceptor sees only blurs and may be unable to distinguish the circled warhead from the decoys. THEODORE POSTAL: You would not be able to pick out the target because the interceptors have very poor resolution; an object is seen as just a smear to the interceptor. JEFFREY KAYE: Postal says simple techniques using metallicized balloons can be used to disguise the actual warhead. THEODORE POSTAL: You can put the warheads in the balloons, for example, you would not know where to hit the warhead. The warhead might only be half a meter or a meter across. The balloon might be tens of meters in size. You wouldn't know how to choose the point at which to hit the warhead. JEFFREY KAYE: The system's proponents say it will be able to discriminate between warheads and decoys, or countermeasures, as they are sometimes called. GENERAL LESTER LYLES: We actually have conducted two flight tests already for a national missile defense. We call them sensor flyby tests. They were primarily designed to demonstrate that the seeker, with the kill vehicle that we have on our system, that the seeker can be able to pick out the actual threat reentry vehicle from amongst decoys, debris, and other things that you normally would consider to be either intended or unintended countermeasures. And those two tests were very, very successful. JEFFREY KAYE: But some question the test record. PHILIP COYLE: I think the technology has been demonstrated from the Physics point of view. What we haven't demonstrated yet is that we can reduce this to practice. What we haven't demonstrated yet is that it's practical. JEFFREY KAYE: Is it too early, is it premature to talk at this point about the reliability of this planned system? PHILIP COYLE: We don't have any test results yet to know one way or the other. JEFFREY KAYE: Whether it will work? PHILIP COYLE: That's correct. JEFFREY KAYE: There have been 16 attempts to actually hit a warhead with a missile out in space. Only two succeeded. The most recent missile test was of the Theater High-altitude Area Air Defense, or THAAD, interceptor. That occurred March 29. It was the sixth time THAAD attempted to hit a target, and for the sixth time it failed to do so. That day at a briefing, General Lyles said many aspects of the test worked. GENERAL LESTER LYLES: We know that ground systems work very, very well. The radar systems work very well. Everything seemed to work very, very well, with the exception, obviously, of what happened relative to the closing end game for the missile. JEFFREY KAYE: But with all due respect, and I understand you've had a number of successes - GENERAL LESTER LYLES: Yes. JEFFREY KAYE: -- what you describe is that critical end game. In the end, that's all that counts. GENERAL LESTER LYLES: It really is. In all honesty, it really is. We've had some problems with the quality failures and things of that nature. And I feel confident we can overcome those. JEFFREY KAYE: Lyle's confidence is shared by William Graham. Graham was science adviser to President Reagan, and he remains enthusiastic about the eventual success of a national missile defense system. WILLIAM GRAHAM: Failures in the early stages of a rocket program is the norm in rocket science. We've had it in every ballistic missile program we've developed, and undoubtedly it will continue. Early failures shouldn't be either a surprise or a discouragement for doing these things. The U.S. has enormous industrial capabilities, military and scientific capabilities, and betting against those is a sucker bet. JEFFREY KAYE: Graham would like to see the test schedule accelerated. Others say it's already very demanding, or in Pentagon terms, high-risk. PHILIP COYLE: High-risk means there's a good chance that it may not all happen the way it's planned. It may take longer than is planned. JEFFREY KAYE: Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace says the challenges may be insurmountable. He says they are certainly too costly. JOSEPH CIRINCIONE, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: Since 1962, America has spent $120 billion trying to create a missile defense system. That's 120 in current dollars. It's been adjusted for inflation. Since the Star Wars program began in 1983, we've spent almost $55 billion just on this latest rush. It's not for lack of money. It's not for lack of effort that we don't have a missile defense system. JEFFREY KAYE: Lyles says the money and the effort spent on the missile defense program have been worthwhile investments, but acknowledged the technical hurdles that lie ahead. GENERAL LESTER LYLES:The technologies we're using are the technologies that came out of the old Star Wars program. We've evolved them since that particular time period, and we're now integrating those technologies. So from a technology standpoint, we have the technologies, but there is a big challenge in integrating them all together and making them operate as a single system. JEFFREY KAYE: The next major test is scheduled for this August, when for the first time, a prototype of the interceptor will try to hit a target in space. And in June of 2000, President Clinton is scheduled to decide whether to deploy, rather than test, a national missile defense system by 2005.