Wednesday's ICBM intercept test called key for Clinton backing of missile defense

WASHINGTON -- The United States is bracing for another test to intercept and destroy an intercontinental ballistic missile.

Pentagon officials said Wednesday's test will be important in determining whether President Bill Clinton will order the deployment of a national missile defense system. Officials said they must have two metal-to-metal hits to pass a defense readiness review in April or May.

In this week's test, an interceptor missile will be fired from Kwajalein atoll in the Pacific at a Minuteman II missile launched from Vandenburg Air Force Base in California. This is a repeat of October's successful test, in which the interceptor's so-called kill vehicle tracked and destroyed a dummy warhead released by a target missile fired from 7,900 kilometers [4,300 miles] away.

But this time the interceptor will be guided by battle management computers processing and relaying tracking data from early warning satellites and ground based radars in Hawaii and Kwajalein.

"This is a complex test," a senior defense official said. "There are a lot of elements, a lot of players that have to communicate and coordinate in real time, and in less than 30 minutes. The one thing I would like to impress is this is hard to do."

Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon could not say what technical criteria must be met for the Pentagon to declare the system ready for deployment.

"There's going to be a lot of room for definition here," he said. "What is clear to me is that this is a very high priority program. We are working very hard in this building to give the president the information he needs, from the technical side, to make a decision sometime this summer."

The Pentagon has acknowledged that an October test of a critical part of a national missile defense system encountered more technical problems than officials initially revealed. A prime objective of that flight test had been to see if the kill vehicle would distinguish between the balloon and the target.

"We had some problems, challenges, anomalies, and it worked in spite of those,'' the officer said.

The officer said a few minutes after the kill vehicle separated from its rocket booster it spotted the balloon and recognized that it was not the target. It then searched for the target but could not find it.

The vehicle refocused on the balloon when suddenly the target appeared, the officer said. It then turned its attention to the target and struck it.