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You are here: Home / Press Room / Center in the News / The Economist Story on Missile Defense Quotes Kingston Reif and Phil Coyle

September 6, 2014

The Economist Story on Missile Defense Quotes Kingston Reif and Phil Coyle

The Unsheltering Sky

September 6, 2014

As test flights go, FTG-06b was a dazzling affair. The mission was part of a programme called Ground-based Midcourse Defence (GMD), which is supposed to provide America’s main shield against intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) with a range beyond 5,500km (3,418 miles). FTG-06b involved the launch (pictured opposite) on June 22nd from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California of a hypersonic interceptor. It successfully annihilated an unarmed warhead which had been fired into space from a US Army site on Kwajalein Atoll in the western Pacific Ocean.

The warhead was tracked by two American naval vessels: a destroyer equipped with an Aegis anti-missile system and a $900m floating offshore oil-rig, which had been kitted out with a highly sophisticated active phased-array X-band radar. Far more powerful than conventional radar, the X-band system can calculate—with the help of some big computers in Colorado Springs—the size, shape and trajectory of a baseball-sized object 4,000km away travelling at 32,000kph.

Twelve years ago the United States withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, a 1972 deal that limited the testing and deployment of anti-ICBM weapons by America, the former Soviet Union and, later, Russia and some ex-Soviet republics. Since then, most technological advances in such systems have been in America, where the Missile Defence Agency (MDA) has spent some $98 billion on various projects since 2002. Although China appears to be working on an anti-ICBM system, Russia is the only other country with such a programme—and it is far less capable, says Jeffrey Caton, a former US Air Force colonel and space-warfare specialist.

Meanwhile, the threat grows as potential attackers continue to acquire “more complex, survivable, reliable and accurate” ICBMs equipped with countermeasures, Vice-Admiral James Syring, the MDA’s boss, told Senate lawmakers in June. Next year Iran could have a ballistic missile able to reach America, he added. But others think that is at least several years away. North Korea is also testing rockets and satellite systems which could carry a nuclear warhead. Arun Prakash, a former chairman of India’s Chiefs of Staff Committee, sees the one-upmanship between offence and defence systems as “a ding-dong battle” with the defender at a perpetual disadvantage because it is far easier to build a missile than shoot it down.

Read the full article here.

Posted in: Center in the News, Press Room

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