Word: interceptor
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...American security. One of the reasons the development of an effective missile defense has been so slow and costly is that the ABM treaty prevents us from testing the most promising technologies, such as sea-based and space-based weapons. Even today, we cannot test a high-speed interceptor against any incoming missile traveling faster than 5 km per SEC. because the Russians are afraid it might be effective against their ICBMs. This is quite crazy. It means that because of a cold war relic, the U.S. has to forgo building the most effective defense it can against nuclear attack...
...news, too, for a U.S. president looking for a way out of his political dilemma over whether to green-light the system. The New York Times reported Friday that Pentagon documents reveal that the military's testing of the proposed $60 billion missile system are designed to allow the interceptor "kill vehicle" to hit its target despite a basic flaw: its inability to distinguish between a real warhead and decoys that would be routinely deployed in any missile attack...
...system has been developed, at a cost of some $200 million, to strengthen Israel's northern border in the wake of its withdrawal from Lebanon. "It's more analogous to the Patriot than anything else," explains Thompson, referring to the interceptor missile system deployed in Israel and Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War to defend against Iraq's SCUD missiles. But that system had a verifiable kill rate of only 25 percent of incoming missiles, according to a General Accounting Office study, and the new weapon faces a more complex challenge. "The Patriot system was cued by satellites whenever...
...There are certainly technological advantages to a 'boost-phase' interceptor system, because the missiles are easier to hit and they won't yet have deployed their decoys," says TIME Pentagon correspondent Mark Thompson. "But conversely, you've got to know who all the bad guys are and have stationed interceptor systems in each of their immediate neighborhoods in order to make it work. More important, the Pentagon will argue, the system mooted by Putin can't be built quickly enough - it would take 10 years rather than the five envisaged by Washington to cope with the emergence of a potential...
...Missile defense remains politically popular in the U.S. - so much so that the administration favors the limited version designed to deploy some 250 interceptor missiles against "rogue states," while the Bush campaign favors a massive missile shield that protects the U.S. and its allies from all missile threats. This despite the fact that skeptics have questioned everything from the system's cost and viability to its potential to destabilize the existing arms control regime. Some of Washington's key European allies used President Clinton's valedictory tour this week to echo Russia's warning that building a missile-defense system...