Word: warheaded
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...heavily guarded launchpad at Vandenberg Air Force Base, 125 miles up the Pacific Coast from Los Angeles, a 63-ft.-tall gleaming white rocket sits and waits. Secreted in the nose of the 37-year-old Minuteman II is a 5-ft.-long cone--a mock warhead--and a deflated Mylar balloon. Let's say they are part of an incoming missile from North Korea or Iran. Meanwhile...
...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...
...system. While Pentagon officers insist there will be future chances to halt its construction, a success this week could make that politically all but impossible. Congress is chafing to fund the system (see following story) and was heartened by the first test, in which an interceptor pulverized a fake warhead last October. In a second test in January, however, the interceptor missed its target by 241 ft. when a cooling line clogged and shut down its heat-seeking sensors. As a TIME investigation shows, little is being left to chance this time. So little, in fact, that this...
...failure proves more embarrassing to advocates of the system, since critics had pointed out that the tests was primed to succeed by eliminating the most basic of decoys from the equation. Scientific critics have argued that the system has an inherent inability, in battlefield conditions, to distinguish an enemy warhead from a cone-shaped traffic beacon. Advocates counter that the tests are simply trying to establish whether the system can walk before trying to make it run. It doesn't help their case, though, that the interceptor system isn't even managing to stay on its feet...
...interceptors to guard against one or two missiles fired by "rogue states," candidate George W. Bush has committed himself to a comprehensive, "Star Wars"-like anti-missile shield that would eliminate all threats. And, needless to say, the Chinese, whose long-range nuclear fleet comprises only about 20 single-warhead missiles, is taking the matter personally, because its own nuclear deterrent might be eliminated by even President Clinton's limited defense. Beijing has warned that if Washington goes ahead it will be forced to expand its own missile fleet, which might prompt India to do the same in response, triggering...