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January 27, 2007
Another Success For Missile Shield

Early this morning, an American anti-ballistic missile shot down a medium-range target over the Pacific Ocean, another in a string of successful tests aimed at building an umbrella against nuclear attacks on North America:

The Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency shot down a dummy target missile over the southern Pacific Ocean during a test of the U.S. missile defense shield early Saturday, according to an agency spokeswoman.

First, a dummy ballistic missile was fired from a U.S. mobile launch platform in the Pacific Ocean in a simulated attack.

Moments later, an interceptor missile was fired from the agency's missile range facility on Hawaii's Kekaha Island and struck the dummy warhead over the Pacific Ocean, military footage showed.

The mobile, ground-based system is designed to protect the United States from short to intermediate-range high altitude ballistic missile attacks in the North American region, agency spokeswoman Pam Rogers said.

The system "intercepts missiles that are shorter range and at the end of their flight trajectory. It is part of the ballistic missile defense system, a layered system that is designed to intercept all types of missiles in all phases of flights," Rogers said.

This part of the system, which can target short-range missiles as well as intermediate-range, had been tested at White Sands several times since 2005. The DoD moved it to Hawaii after a successful test in October, and this was the first test since that time. The success shows that the ballistic missile shield can work in field conditions and has demonstrated portability, an important point when building a reliable network of intercept stations.

Once again, the underlying technology of a missile shield has been shown to succeed, despite the dire predictions of expensive futility by critics. If the system can be developed quickly enough, it will render moot any attempt by rogue nations such as Iran and North Korea to build ballistic missiles for the purposes of extortion. It will take them decades to catch up to our defenses and likely would bankrupt them if they tried.

We may have seen the path out of the nuclear standoff in which we have lived for the last 60 years, traced across the sky by a successful intercept. That's a strategy worth pursuing.

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Posted by Ed Morrissey at January 27, 2007 10:27 AM

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