Posted on 12/03/2001 9:49:33 PM PST by TD911
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States military on Monday successfully carried out a twice-delayed test shoot-down of a missile warhead over the Pacific Ocean, advancing missile defense plans opposed by Moscow and Beijing.
``The Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO) announced today (Monday) that it has successfully completed a test involving a planned intercept of an intercontinental ballistic missile target,'' the Defense Department said in a statement.
In the test, a ``kill vehicle'' projectile fired from Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific intercepted and destroyed the dummy warhead launched on a Minuteman-2 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California about 4,800 miles away.
The test was postponed on Saturday and Sunday nights because of bad weather.
The United States had failed in two of four previous attempts to shoot down ``a bullet with a bullet'' in space over the Pacific. Both Russia and China oppose U.S. plans to develop a missile shield, saying it would violate the 1972 anti-ballistic missile (ABM) treaty and could trigger a new arms race.
The test is part of the Bush administration's goal of building a limited shield to protect against ballistic missiles from ``rogue'' nations such as North Korea, Iran and Iraq.
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A dispatch from Washington in the international section of today's New York Times begins, "A prototype antimissile weapon demolished a mock warhead tonight high above the Pacific Ocean in the second consecutive success for the Pentagon's costly missile defense program, military officials said."The news article would be better if some editor had deleted the word "costly." The article eventually mentions that missile defense spending is now about $5.3 billion a year and that the Bush administration wants to increase that to $8.3 billion. Why not let the readers decide for themselves whether that is costly?
It's a matter of opinion, after all. While $5.3 billion is costly by the standard of an individual American household budget, it isn't really all that much for a federal program. And some would argue that it is cheap compared to the price of having an American city struck by a missile armed with a nuclear or chemical warhead.
The Times manages, elsewhere in today's newspaper, to write about "the Medicare program" and "Democrats demanding increased aid to the unemployed and low-income workers." The Times doesn't refer in those cases to "the costly Medicare program" or to Democrats demanding "costly increased aid to the unemployed and low-income workers."
Only the missile defense spending is tagged with the label "costly." That's a signal from the New York Times news department that missile defense is a bad idea and that spending on it should be opposed. There are plenty of readers who, no matter what their views on the merits of antimissile spending, would prefer that the Times news columns retained at least a pretense of neutrality on the issue.
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Sure brightens my day.
I agree, the article is very negative, even the headline. I believe that this is the second success in a ROW, but you won't see that in the Reuters article, eh? As far as the "delays", as pointed out by others here, the delay for weather was NOT because the missles couldn't operate in bad weather. It was for safety concerns for our observation planes, etc.
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