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16 December 2004 |
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http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/... |
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush remains intent on deploying a multibillion-dollar shield as an ``important deterrent'' against ballistic missile attack, the White House said on Thursday, a day after the system's first flight test in two years ended in failure. Scott McClellan, Bush's spokesman, did not address a delay in activating the first parts of the planned shield. It appeared to have slipped into next year, partly because of technical difficulties. ``The president remains firmly committed to moving forward on a missile defense system,'' he told reporters. ``Given the threats that we face in this day and age, missile defense is an important deterrent.'' In December 2002, Bush ordered the Pentagon to have the ground-based component up and running no later than this year. Boeing Co. is the Pentagon's prime contractor on the project, which would be stitched into a multilayered defense. The latest test went wrong when an interceptor rocket shut down in its silo on Wednesday in the Marshall Islands in the central Pacific because of ``an unknown anomaly,'' the Defense Department's Missile Defense Agency said. A target missile carrying a dummy warhead had been fired 16 minutes earlier from Kodiak, Alaska. The Missile Defense Agency had no comment on future test plans or any new target for declaring the system operational ``since we don't know the cause of the anomaly we experienced,'' spokesman Richard Lehner said late on Wednesday. The Pentagon has already suggested its schedule is slipping. ``I'm not constrained by timing, exactly,'' Michael Wynne, the Pentagon's chief weapons buyer, said last week in reply to a question about switching the system on. ``But we'll see how (Wednesday's test) goes and then we'll see from there.'' In eight attempted intercept tests, five have succeeded in highly controlled conditions that critics say bear no resemblance to any real-world situations. Initially, the system is designed to defend against North Korean missiles that could be tipped with nuclear, chemical or germ warheads and fired at U.S. soil. The Pentagon plans to spend more than $50 billion in the next five years on a wide range of related projects, including sea-based interceptors, a modified 747 jumbo jet airborne laser and what could become the first weapons in space. Boeing's key subcontractors on the ground-based component are Northrop Grumman Corp., for command and control; Raytheon Co., for a ``kill vehicle'' meant to obliterate a target by colliding with it; and Lockheed Martin Corp. and Orbital Sciences Corp., which build booster rockets.
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