US Missle Interceptor Tests a Success

An anonymous reader writes to mention that the U.S. Missile Defense Agency and Lockheed Martin recently reported success in the test flight of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile system. "THAAD is designed to defend U.S. troops, allied forces, population centers and critical infrastructure against short- to intermediate range ballistic missiles. THAAD comprises a fire control and communications system, interceptors, launchers and a radar. The THAAD interceptor uses hit-to-kill technology to destroy targets, and is the only weapon system that engages threat ballistic missiles at both endo- and exo-atmospheric altitudes."

Comments

IT'S SPELT MISSILE

[Anonymous Coward]

download Firefox and you'll see the big fucking red line /spelling nazi

Translation

[everphilski]

It uses kinetic energy to destroy a target (1/2 * m * v**2), no explosives onboard.

Testing for more testing, not for use...

[RyanFenton]

From TFA:

'Lockheed Martin's program manager and vice president for the THAAD program... "On the expansive range at PMRF, the THAAD missile can fly greater distances, increasing our testing options and creating a realistic tactical environment"'

The article seems to indicate that this testing is not to allow for use, but to allow for further testing. This wasn't the "prove it works" test, but rather the "we could possibly get it to work" test.

I'm personally against the political use of such systems - it defeats the progress we've made in terms of MAD over the REAL threats to humanity in terms of nuclear weapons - politicians are already eager enough to justify use of weapons when in "this new terrorist era" or whatnot. But if it DOES work, and it does save lives, then it's development is still a net good - I'd just still be against deployment until we have direct evidence it would be necessary to save humanity. I'd much rather put 10000 times the effort into not needing such a tool, rather than spend all our efforts on a new arms race.

Ryan Fenton

Re:Testing for more testing, not for use...

[kaiser423]

No, it actually means that out on white Sands they could only shoot short-range targets. They hit those regularly. Out in the ocean by Hawaii they can shoot much longer range missiles since it's not flying over land, so they're testing the mid-range capabilities and those are working also.

White Sands proved that they could shoot down short range missiles, and the PMRF testing is ensuring that they can hit medium range missiles. It's just another step. Now they'll try more complex geometries. But the test was nearly 100% valid as a real-world training exercise. The system works now; they're not saying "we could make it work." They're saying that it just did.

Not anymore.

[Kadin2048]

I thought that the President had basically annulled that treaty, by saying that it was with a country that no longer exists, and thus is not in force anymore (or something like that).

If you look on the top of the page you linked to, it says "The State Department web site below is a permanent electronic archive of information released prior to January 20, 2001. Please see www.state.gov for material released since President George W. Bush took office on that date."

A quick Google search reveals that the U.S. dumped the 1972 ABM treaty in December of 2001.

There are a lot of things that I take issue with Bush for, but this frankly isn't one of them; I've always been of a mind that it's lunacy to prevent nations from defending themselves. If the world is getting dangerous because of ICBMs, maybe that should be the focus of restrictions, not systems that protect from them. But then again, I've never been down with the whole "MAD" concept in general.

Re:Not anymore.

[Martin Blank]

You should read your own link more carefully.

President Bush said Thursday the United States has notified Russia that it intends to pull out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, starting a six-month timetable for withdrawal and opening the way for the creation of an anti-missile defense system.

He did not annul the treaty, but rather went through the process detailed in the treaty for withdrawing from it by providing six months of notice to the president of Russia. He went on to say that the Soviet Union and the hostility that it had towards the United States no longer existed, and so the ABM had become a hindrance to new threats, losing its value.

Re:Not anymore.

[Greyfox]

Yeah except that it's another red herring that lulls us into a false sense of security. None of the guys currently developing nuclear weapons will use a missile to deliver them to the USA. For one thing they'll nuke Israel, India, South Korea or Pakistan. For another, even if they DID want to nuke the USA they'd put the "device" on a shipping container on a boat, not on a long range missile.

The MAD concept, as insane as it was, worked rather nicely. If either side thought they could survive a nuclear exchange (Say, because they had a working anti-missile system) they would have nuked the other side in a heartbeat. Then everyone in the world would have had to deal with fallout from several thousand nuclear devices exploding. I suspect that a "limited nuclear exchange" between two countries in the next 20-40 years is unavoidable and we can only hope that the devistation that results from that is enough to persuade the rest of the world that pursuing these weapons is a losing proposition.

Re:Not anymore.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/archive/archive? ArchiveId=15816

"The establishment of the Zionist regime was a move by the world oppressor against the Islamic world," the president told a conference in Tehran on Wednesday, entitled The World without Zionism.

"The skirmishes in the occupied land are part of a war of destiny. The outcome of hundreds of years of war will be defined in Palestinian land," he said.

"As the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map," said Ahmadinejad, referring to Iran's revolutionary leader Ayat Allah Khomeini.

Re:Sounds great but...

[kaiser423]

That's actually how the THAAD tests work. Same with Aegis, and the GMD (ground-based on the coast).

They use nothing but the actual hardware that's in the field. No special stuff to track the target. This is actually a working, real-world style system. Typically, they put the operator on alert for a couple of days or a week (at least in Aegis tests), and they fire it sometime during that window without notifying anyone. They also usually fire a couple of other missiles at the cruiser (well, near misses) that the crew also has to destroy while launching their interceptor.

It's a neat, nearly totally mature capability and it is currently a real deterrent.

Re:New arms race?

[Jack9]

There is no question as the technology is perhaps the worst kind. A lucrative defense contract that produced a system that doesnt work in real world scenarios. Are you so misled by a defense contractor's press release to ask a followup question or are you being sarcastic?

http://www.davidsuzuki.org/about_us/Dr_David_Suzuk i/Article_Archives/weekly07250301.asp to give you a high school primer on the physics of distance vs speed, which is noticeably independent of the targetting concerns. We wont hear about this until the system " unfortunately fails to counter" a simple rocket launched from a truck somewhere near Washington D.C.

"If you build a missile defense that is so fragile almost anything an adversary does will cause it to collapse, then you invite a weak adversary to (attack)" - Theodore A. Postol

Re:New arms race?

[Martin Blank]

Submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) are not intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) from a technical sense, and usually not from a practical sense, either. Trident missiles used by the US and UK have a range of 12,000km, more than double the maximum range used by the State Department when describing IRBMs. Russia has used SLBMs with ranges of 7000km or more (up to about 8000km) since the early 1960s). Only the French and Chinese field SLBMs with ranges that fall within the State Dept's definition of an IRBM (3000km-5500km).

THAAD is intended for use against tactical weapons, such as those that might be deployed over a theater. Mixing eras, it would be used against weapons with V-1 and V-2 missile ranges. It's also far less expensive (and apparently far more effective within its given role) than the more well-known ABM system, and will be complementary to the eventual deployment of the ABL, which itself sort of straddles the divide, being dependent more on the curvature of the earth than anything else for its range.

And nuclear weapons

[Ungrounded Lightning]

This is far superior to the "miss-to-kill" technology they were employing in previous models

Joke all you want, but that's what we've actually been doing. Didn't anybody ever tell you that close counts with hand grenades?

And nuclear weapons.

Which, unfortunately, was exactly the "big boom" "kinda close" that had been contemplated in some previous ABM designs.

After all, if it has blossomed, MIRV style, into a cloud of decoys and multiple real nuclear bombs on independent trajectories, spread out by quite a bit by the time your missile gets there, you need a BIG boom to disable all of them that matter. And without an atmosphere to carry a shockwave it helps if you can irradiate with heat, gammas, and neutrons, and can vaporize the whole antimissile and hit the targets with the vapor.

Problem with that is you're setting off your OWN nukes above your OWN targets - and high enough above the atmosphere to do a major electromagnetic pulse when the gamma burst makes a sheet of electrons the size of a continent jump upward by a few miles. (With defenses like that who needs an enemy missile with a real warhead? Other than to provoke the defense.)

So, yes, "hit to kill" is a BIG improvement over the "miss-to-kill technology they were using in previous models". (Assuming you have at least as many anti-missiles as they sent warheads and convincing decoys.)