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Interceptor Missile Fails Test Launch
jangobongo writes "The US missile defense system suffered a serious setback today, just 2 weeks before it was scheduled to be activated. A target ICBM was launched from Alaska, but crashed harmlessly into the ocean as the interceptor missile based on an atoll in the Pacific Ocean shut itself down due to an unknown "anomaly". The cause of the failure could have been anything from a software glitch to a major hardware malfunction."
And the United States wonders why we're [Canada] reluctant to join the missile defence programme...
It doesn't work, that is why.
is that the system is already being deployed. NPR interviewed an expert who said that the testing is going so slowly and so badly because President Bush decided to deploy the system before it was functiona. The last test was two years ago and also failed. He (the expert, not Bush) estimated it will take twenty years to have a working system given the current testing rate.
The main question is whether or not there is a real threat to the United States. Twenty years ago, it was conceivable that the USSR would roll into Canada and attack the United States, or would start raining hellfire on the country as a whole.
These days, the threat is from countries that have limited missile capabilities. North Korea has the ability to fly only a few hundred kilometres with their existing missiles, and the same is for Iran and all those Middle Eastern countries.
As a Canadian, i do not see a purpose to doing this, and see diplomacy as a method of getting things done at the very best. If someone is going to attack the United States, it's going to be ground based, nuclear or not.
Driving to work this morning (in Australia) the discussion on the radio was about the half trillion USD current account deficit and the half trillion USD budget deficit. Using my basic maths but woeful understabding of economics this still adds up to a lot of money the US owes. That some high paid US citizens now have their desperately needed tax cuts (after all, new cars are expensive - not to mention Country Club dues) I guess the rest of you will just have to work a bit harder to pay it off. :(
On reading about the missile test failure earlier today I was prompted to go and visit the MDA website http://www.acq.osd.mil/mda/mdalink/html/mdalink.ht ml to see what spin they put on it. Frankly, for the cost of this supposed program one would have expected a better website!
Seriously though you are right to criticise the cost and waste. That our (Australian) government has signed us up to participate in this program makes me even more depressed.
Repeated studies and analysis by the AAS and US physicists shows the futility of most of the current MDA program. Still, somebody is obviously benefitting from it. Downgrading the NSF grants may eventually get rid of those pesky physicists involved in non-defence research so the criticism will go away.
This story reminded me of another story that was in the press the past few days about a very expensive spy program that a few US Congressmen critized. We're talking about billions of dollars here.
I have to wonder how long it will be before the US Government files for bankruptcy because of the cost of projects such as this.
Some news sources were talking about how the first phase of this missle defense project is supposed to protect us against a North Korea launched nuclear attack. I'm asking (because I don't fully know), how much of a risk is North Korea in reality?
Personally, I hope the defense project fails... otherwise Canada will be forced to disagree again with American policy. I'm sure there'll be economic consequences.
I wrote this for an English teacher of mine so I won't bother to reformat it, but it shows why us Canadians are reluctant to join into this program.
Winnipeg is among Canadian cities where a North Korean nuclear missile could land if the U.S. shot it out of the sky with its ballistic missile defence technology.
Although the chance of Winnipeg getting hit is distance, it's still a sobering thought for Prairie dwellers at a time when U.S. President George W. Bush is pushing Canada to sign onto his plan.
If the U.S. hit the feared missiles early enough, they would make it no farther then the arctic before landing or breaking apart. But a few minutes delay and a missile could fall much closer to its target, such as in southern Canada.
The anti missile technology works by destroying the rocket's booster rocket.
The Nuclear warhead would either break apart and scatter radioactive material over a wide path, or continue intact but come short of it's target, if it did hit the ground it may, or may not explode.
U.S analysts haven't thought much about the consequences for Canada, which lies in the path or a nuclear missile from North Korea, or of Berlin and Edinburgh, which lie in the path of a nuclear missile from Iran. A United States official commented that saving New York is worth killing one or two of our reindeer.
If you draw a line on the globe from North Korea to Chicago, it passes quite close to Yellowknife, The Pas, Kenora, and Winnipeg . I suppose Chicago is worth the three reindeer in Assiniboine Park, and 600 000 Winnipeggers eh?
The trajectory to Washington passes not far from Toronto.
If Canada joins this plan, we would have to demand protection of our major cities, but more then likely if we do join this, we will just end up being a target.
Do you know how many of these things the US military has just sitting around? It's actually cheaper to shoot a few off, because then we don't have to pay maintainance and storage costs on them.
:)
Not to say the program isn't a waste of money...
Well, this has been the US's wet dream for a long time. If we're able to shoot down other people's nukes we get to own the world and all that. Also, this isn't nearly the first time we've failed miserably at it.
We're shouldn't be talking about how much money has been poured into this thing this year, we should be talking about how much has been poured into it since at least the 80s, and probably before that.
On an aside, here at MIT a Professor Postol gave a very convincing lecture a year or two ago on the fraud surrounding the first National Missile Defence test, and the subsequent cover-up of the allegations by MIT's Lincoln Labs and others. Needless to say, he's received a lot of "pressure" from all over the place. More info here.
We are at war. However the war is against none of the usual suspects. Not terrorism, not poverty, not Iraq, not Drugs, not even Comminism or totalianism. We are fighting our economy right now. And the sad truth is that the only way our country can sustain itself is by having a massive expenditure on the military and an even larger spending on private contracting. However we justify that spending is irrelevent. The war is on the economy, because as a country, we are economically slipping down a slippery slope. Soon we will be unable to dig ourselves out of this self-perpetuating cycle of milirary spending. And then a real war will begin, because we will have lost the war on the economy.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Huh? so what exactly did the wire reporters get wrong? I am especially eager to know since they are quoting a statement from the Defense Department's Missile Defense Agency.
I guess now any barely coherent rant on how the so called "liberal media" don't know anything is bound to be marked "informative".
The chief weapons tester doesn't even have confidence in the system.
I don't see how this system will ever work unless our attacker warns us in advance of the missile's launch time, its location, flight trajectory,....etc. What a waste of taxpayer money. People should be outraged.
what happens when the interceptor hit "nucular" missiles above or near our coasts? Wouldnt there still be fallouts?
I'd propose for a program that creates maybe something like an EMP blaster or force firewall that virtually disables the incoming missiles..
it amazes me that a simple interceptor, that i thought is already an old technology, fail..
Have you ever been in the middle of a war zone?
The phrase "war zone" doesn't really have any meaning. It's just an expression that people who've never left home use in order to sound worldly.
I was in Iraq for nine months from the summer of 2003 to the spring of 2004. Does that count?
Much of the fighting has taken place in cities with marines moving door to door to secure the city.
Very little of the fighting has been like that. That kind of work took place almost exclusively in Fallujah, last month.
We bomb the cities from ships forty miles away
No, we used only PGMs in the Iraqi conurbations. We never "bombed the cities." We used regular, unguided munitions dropped from B-52s to destroy the terrorist camps northeast of Baghdad, but those were dozens of miles away from any built-up areas. There was nothing to pound but dirt and terrorist camps.
we told the UN to fuck off
Um. You're very confused. The UN Security Council, in the person of permanent member France, told us to fuck off, not the other way around.
And yes, we invaded on our own terms. That's the only way an invasion happens. You don't invade on anybody else's terms.
Strangely, we can't even supply our troops with enough armor!
Take a look at the loss figures and explain to me, please, how the most successful military campaign in the history of warfare can be characterized by the phrase "not enough armor."
Regardless, we should address the problems at home before we go invading other countries.
Typical wrong-headed thinking. We go invading other countries to prevent problems at home. During the 1990s we failed to invade Sudan, choosing instead to fire cruise missiles. We failed to invade Afghanistan when the Taliban set up a veritable terrorist ivy league, choosing instead to (again) fire cruise missiles.
What happened? September 11 happened. It became --you see where I'm going here? --a problem at home.
I write in my journal
And the sad truth is that the only way our country can sustain itself is by having a massive expenditure on the military and an even larger spending on private contracting.
Is that the true "truth"?
While spend $100 Billion on the military and private contractors to stimulate the economy would work, but spending $100 Billion to get the homeless off the streets and into a job, with much of the money going to private contracotrs, would work just as well, if not better.
We spend $100 Billion on military contractors because the contractors have incredible political power, and they are able to push all the right buttons.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
Actually an imperfect shield is very dangerous because it makes people think they have a are protected and they tend to do stupid things.
... but the fact is that neither Iran or North Korea are irrational, or able to exist independently from the rest of the world. Some smart politics could easily diffuse either threat.
There is one and only one proven way to prevent nuclear ICBM hits and that is mutually assured destruction. I know it does not sound nice but that is the only proven way. Remember missile defense systems are not new. The russians used build them long time ago, but soon they realized that they are a very unreliable shield and signed the ABM treaty and settled on mutually assured destruction.
The one good thing about an ICBM is that it can always be traced to its origin after it has been fired. So you cannot really fire them anonymously. That is why mutually asured destruction works.
Of course you do not want to always rely on MAD so eventually you will have to diffuse the situation, and you do that through politics. That seems to be very unpopular nowadays, because everyone seems to like a president that puffs up his chest and tells everyone off
North Korea's nuclear program could have been stopped with some smart negotiations for some wheat and rice (which Japan and south korea would gladly pay for). That of course is before Bush made the axis of evil speech which made negotiation impossible.
Iran can also be puruaded to stop its nuclear program. Of course the axis of evil speech did not help there either. But basicly if Iran can be sufficiently asured that they will not be attacked by other nuclear powers they will probably scub their program.
The ICBM threat, of course, is nothing new. It has been countered, for decades, by a nifty little strategy called "massive retaliation". That was enough to keep the USSR at bay, which had a giant stockpile of nuclear weapons and all the ICBMs to carry them. If it could achieve that, it should be able to deal with North Korea or Iran. (It probably helped that Soviet leaders weren't nearly as nuts as Kim Jong-Il, though.)
But aside from that, I actually like the idea of missile defence and am somewhat puzzled by all the critcism. There are two main points that are often brought up:
a) It won't work and therefore the ongoing research is a waste of money. Actually it's rather disappointing to read this so often on a site like Slashdot. People here should be a bit more optimistic about technological development. It can be done in principle, and it will be done sooner or later. It would seem to me that this line of reasoning isn't based on actual disbelief and skepticism but rather on the wish to exploit news like these for arguing against the whole concept.
While failed tests like this (it's not the first) are indeed embarassing and disheartening (we may assume that they didn't say, hey, let's launch an ICBM and see what happens, rather they probably were very sure that at least the result wouldn't be quite that disappointing, even if the ICBM would have gone unharmed) - while news like these are unfortunate, let's face it, they hardly "prove" that the idea of bringing down ICBMs isn't feasible.
The other point of criticism is:
b) This is rearmament in a time when we should be disarming. It will start an arms race! (Actually arms races can be good as a means to wrestle down an economically weak enemy, but nevermind.)
Well, that is a valid point, and it can be somwhat disconcerting to see how the US more and more tends to see the rest of the world as a collection of dangerous potential enemies that must be watched closely and reined in if necessary. But it's no a very strong point. The missile defence system really is one of those few military systems that don't hurt anybody. Oh, it has been claimed that it's really an "offensive" system as it lifts the US out of the "massive retaliation" loop. But who is going to retaliate massively against the US anyhow? North Korea and China? Certainly not!
Yes, the missile defence system might be a waste of time, money, personnel, and other resources. But then again governments wasting money is hardly a new and surprising development ...
No, we used only PGMs in the Iraqi conurbations. We never "bombed the cities." We used regular, unguided munitions dropped from B-52s to destroy the terrorist camps northeast of Baghdad, but those were dozens of miles away from any built-up areas....
Its interesting that you use the term "terrorist". In the context of Iraq, these are people who believe the Americans have no business being there and want to get them out. How does that make them terrorists ? If the russians invaded america if you fought back would that qualify you to be a "terrorist" ? Jeez!
Typical wrong-headed thinking. We go invading other countries to prevent problems at home. During the 1990s we failed to invade Sudan, choosing instead to fire cruise missiles...
We failed to invade Sudan, we invaded Afghanisan, we invaded Iraq, we invaded so and so.... Wow. Who the flying fuck gives America the right to invade whoever it pleases the world over ? Is it just me or have you noticed that it seems to be the only country large scale invading the ass out of the world ? Dont give me that bullcrap about "to prevent problems at home". Iraq had no means of doing the US any harm. All the charges against it were trumped up right down to the laughable WMD threat. The world over people knew that was horseshit and thats why any self respecting country (which wont get squeezed by the US) in the UN told you to fuck off! France got noticed only because it had veto and gave enough of a shit to say something about it...
What happened? September 11 happened. It became --you see where I'm going here? --a problem at home....
You're thinking is laughably simple. What did Sept 11th involve ? Aircraft and a bunch of seriously pissed off fanatics. Period. If you invade every country out there you will multiply the pissed off fanatics five times over. Wiping out "terrorists" in Iraq will only fuel more violence. America has a rich diversity of people and the more countries you invade the larger percentage of you're local populace you're going to have pissed off at you. Yeah thats solving problems at home...sure! --you see where I'm going here ? --mayhem at home! Militancy never solved anything unless it was absolutely necessary.
The numbers killed are "low" because current medical technology is better at keeping patients alive than in any previous war. If you count the injured as well as the dead, the US casualties in Iraq in the last year are comparable to 5 years of Vietnam.
No;
The entire point of a military is rarely to advance society. A militaries purpose is to destroy, and I've never known destruction to advance society. However it has been proven thousands of times that a lack of a military will cause society to degress. Not due to a social collapse, but due to an outside force. Frances society had some major set backs in WWI and WWII... not because of their advanced military but their lack of an adequate one.
There are plenty of examples. There are also examples of countries failing duing to spending too much on their military (it was one of the downfalls of the USSR, and I still thank Reagan for leading them to their doom). However we're not spending anywhere near the amount that led to the USSRs doom (percentage of GDP wise).
If spending money on a purely defensive weapon isn't worth it, I don't know what to say. The fact that 1 nuclear missile can cause millions of deaths, not to mention 100s of billions of dollars in damages seems like a good incentive. Even if it doesn't work right. What if it merely causes a missile to go off course? Well maybe the deathtoll might be merely in the 100s of thousands
Before cursing the military for existing, think what we'd be like without one. I'm personally a supporter of missile defense systems. Sure they may not work right even in 20 years, but maybe by then we'll have a chance.
Phil
How about staying in the fucking office and working, rather than taking a month-long fucking vacation?
Jesus H. Christ, man. Shut off the Rush and Hannity and get relative.
Bush holds the record for the most days spent "at leisure" by a President - that is, outside the White House - while our country had a P-3 Orion forced down, was attacked by OBL, started one war, started another on overwhlmingly false pretenses, and now we have YET ANOTHER FAILURE (in this not-ready-for-prime-time system called missile defense). And people still find a way to defend the man and his actions. This, truly is not the United States I grew up in.
Keeping in mind the August memo was really really vague in it's warnings.
Yeah, like this line: "bin Laden wanted to follow the example of the World Trade Center attack by Ramzi Yusef..."
Or maybe this very vague line:
"bin Laden wanted to hijack U.S. aircraft to gain the release of..."
Or maybe this is the vague part:"FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks including recent surveilance of federal buildings in New York."
Now, I know Bush isn't a mind reader, but when someone tells you that it maybe, might rain, do you grab your umbrella as you leave the house?
Keep in mind that this "test" employed no decoy warheads and that the test ICBM had a freaking HOMING BEACON on it! That's how we build a missle defense system - hey wait, can we get a set of $50 Million training wheels for this piece of shit?
Typical of right-wingers with an agenda instead of a cause.
You see the Agenda we can't stand is the smoke & mirrors of these projects. You know the smoke that a missile defense "shield" will make us stronger/"safer" and the mirror that the failure of the program that Bush wants isn't Bush's fault. Take a vote, and I bet the public would drop this for the pork project it is.
If this were a cause, it would be an international & consorted effort of defense of democracies against known enemies and terrorist groups. Instead it's an agenda to line the pockets of specific groups and agenda makers.
Instead we're told pork-barrel projects such as Social Security, Medicare, Health-Care and welfare are a huge waste of tax dollars yet ALL of them could have been solvent for our lifetime had we not insisted on these useless "defense" programs and wars.
Scramjet is completely different than missile defense programs and dummy ICBM's being wasted. Scramjet is a technology that could potentially increase our feasibility of cheaper exploration of space and faster transportation. I guess Scramjet falls under that useless "science" category huh?
Remember, It's a democracy and we can voice our opinions just like you. Dissent and questioning government is the only defense and expectation of a true democracy.
If Bush didn't want us to think his policies were useless then its up to that man to turn those views around. I'm tired of the pointless defenses of this man without any sustenance.
If your not a right-winger or a neo-con I must apologize. However as a citizen of this country and someone who is fitting the bill for our government my voice should be heard and democracy doesn't mean the blind leading the blind.
Iraqis like to point out that after the 1991 war, Saddam restored the badly destroyed electric grid in only three months. Some six months after Bush declared an end to major hostilities, a much more ambitious and costly American effort has yet to get to that point.
Yes, it is pretty amazing what you can do when you hold a gun to someone's head. Literally. Or maybe you forgot. This was a man whose son would grab women off the street and rape them. He tortured people by the thousands, for no good reason.
I think that if you had to seriously worry about your entire family "disappearing" because you didn't meet an impossible schedule, you would meet it too.
Was that it was initially delayed because of "bad weather". If they can't even test it in bad weather, do they really think it will be reliable?
I've long since come to believe that regardless of the sound science that has shown the entire concept of catching an incoming missle largely impossible (anyone concerned with MIRV's?). What blows my mind (and should blow yours as well) is that we were a mere two months away from deploying a system that is, clearly defective in nature. Unless I've missed something, there aren't too many countries out there even capable of throwing an ICBM at us. Those babies are a little bit tough to hide....particulalry during any testing. We have a probability of a missle shield becasue this has been an agenda item for the Republican party for a good long time. For those of you who haven't taken an econ class lately, this is guns or butter at its finest. Let's just not piss anyone off without thinking it through first. And, hope that noone's going to throw an ICBM at us. Because gee, they've been doing that a lot since WWII......
befuddled (noun) 1. Unable to create a pithy sig