Vol. 72/No. 10      March 10, 2008

The test is a registration of the U.S. government’s progress in developing a missile “defense” system aimed at enabling Washington to use its arsenal of more than 4,000 nuclear weapons without reprisal. According to the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency, Washington “by late 2004 fielded a system that provides a limited defense capability to intercept and destroy a ballistic missile launched from North Korea or Iran.”

Washington has worked closely with Tokyo in extending its antiballistic missile system to Japan and the region around the Korean peninsula.

On February 4, a U.S. Navy warship equipped with AEGIS antiballistic missile technology docked at the port of Haifa in Israel. The Jerusalem Post reported that this system “could be deployed in the region in the event of an Iranian missile attack against Israel.” Israel is currently the only state with a nuclear arsenal in the Middle East, with an estimated 80 strategic nuclear weapons, according to the Federation of American Scientists.

The Pentagon began modifying the SM-3 missile and three Navy warships in January in preparation for the satellite shootdown. The missile has been used in a number of successful tests since 2002, shooting down short- or medium-range ballistic missiles. This is the first time it has been used against a satellite.

U.S. officials denied they were using the shootdown to test the weapons program. They claimed that, due to a computer failure, the satellite was falling out of orbit toward earth and its fuel tank posed a potential threat should it make it through the atmosphere and land in a populated area.

But after the shootdown, U.S. defense secretary Robert Gates told the press, “people remember a time some years ago when missile defense was extremely controversial and there were a lot of people who questioned whether it would work or not… . I believe a side benefit of yesterday’s action was to underscore that the money that Congress has been voting for this has resulted in a very real capability.”

The Chinese and Russian governments criticized the action. The Russian defense ministry said Washington “is trying to use the accident with its satellite to test its national anti-missile defense system’s capability to destroy other countries’ satellites.”

“Demonstrably, we do have an [anti-satellite] capability now,” David Mosher, a defense and space expert for Rand Corp., told the Washington Post. “Anyone who followed national missile defense issues knew we’ve had that inherent ability for some time. But now it’s real, and we can expect there will be consequences.”

“It shows that our missile defense programs are not just missile defense programs,” Victoria Samson, a research analyst at the Center for Defense Information, told the Post. “They’re also anti-satellite programs.”

“It certainly would seem that protecting people against a hazardous fuel was not what this was really about,” Geoffrey Forden, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology told the Post. Forden said that there was virtually no chance that the satellite’s fuel tank would have remained intact upon entering the earth’s atmosphere.
 
 
Related articles:
U.S. missile shield: a deadly weapon  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home