Word: kwajaleins
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About 4,800 miles away on Kwajalein Atoll, perched atop a Pacific coral reef, another rocket sits and waits. Nestled inside its nose cone is a $20 million bullet known as the exoatmospheric kill vehicle. It looks more like a mobile moonshine still than a snub-nosed round, but in the vacuum of space, there are no points for style. Its job is to find and then destroy the incoming "warhead" from Pyongyang or Tehran...
Within moments of liftoff, the infrared sensors on a Pentagon satellite perched 22,000 miles above the earth should pick up the rocket's flaming plume. The satellite will alert ground-based radars in Hawaii and Kwajalein, which will begin searching the northeastern skies for the intruder. In a fully deployed system, early-warning radars in Alaska, California, Britain, Greenland and Massachusetts would get the alarm. Updates on the target's path will pour into the U.S. Space Command's outpost at Cheyenne Mountain, Colo. Computers there will assemble a "weapons task plan" based on the incoming weapon's trajectory...
...trouble is that in this week's test the interceptor won't rely solely on satellites and early-warning radars to trace its target. It will be looking for a target traveling a familiar path--the same California-to-Kwajalein arc used in the previous two tests. And this relatively short distance--as well as safety concerns--means the mock warhead won't be traveling as fast as a genuinely hostile one. This "single end-game geometry," said an independent review panel headed by retired General Larry Welch last fall, "raises questions about the ability of the flight-test program...
...sniffing at the scent of new money (beyond the $60 billion spent since President REAGAN unveiled the plan 16 years ago). Out in the Pacific, officials of the Republic of the Marshall Islands are hinting that they expect the Pentagon to pay more for its use of the Kwajalein atoll. Kwajalein's isolation and its shallow, 900-sq.-mi. lagoon have made it an ideal bull's-eye for U.S. missile tests for decades. The Pentagon has access to "Kwaj" through 2001, with a renewal option to 2016. As part of the deal, the islands get American aid. But they...
...night in June 1984, a test ICBM soared up from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Thousands of miles away in the middle of the Pacific, another rocket was launched on Kwajalein Island. It contained an infrared sensor powerful enough to detect heat from a human body 1,000 miles away. Closing at 15,000 m.p.h., the rocket locked onto the ICBM, intercepting it in midflight and destroying it by sheer physical impact. So devastating was the hit that the remaining shards of the ICBM's warhead measured less than an inch across...