Free Republic

Two days ahead of North Korea's announced window for a rocket launch, countries are deploying vessels and planes to address the situation. An NHK helicopter on Tuesday spotted a US aegis cruiser near a southwestern island in Okinawa Prefecture. The USS Shiloh was stationary at about 80 kilometers northeast of Miyako Island. The area is near the projected flight path of what the North calls "a satellite", a de facto missile. Aegis vessels are equipped with interceptor missiles and radars capable of tracking ballistic missiles. The USS Shiloh belongs to the US Navy 7th Fleet, based in Yokosuka near Tokyo....

The system Bush may offer is known as a forward-based X-band radar. Transportable by air, it uses high-powered pulsed beams for extremely high-resolution tracking of objects in space such as a missile that could be tipped with a chemical, germ or nuclear warhead. Built by Raytheon Co, the system has been described by U.S. officials as capable of tracking an object the size of a baseball from about 2,900 miles (4,700 km) away. It would let Israel's Arrow missile defences engage a Shahab-3 ballistic missile about halfway through what would be its 11-minute flight to Israel from Iran, or six...

The U.S.-planned missile shield in Europe, including on Czech soil, enjoys majority support in the U.S. Congress though certain doubts persist on the part of some Democrat congresspeople, Bud Cramer, himself a Democrat member of the House of Representatives, told CTK in Prague Monday. If a candidate of the opposition Democrats became the next U.S. president, it would change nothing in the missile defence plans of the current U.S. Administration of George W.Bush, a Republican, Cramer said. If a Democrat won the the presidential elections later this year, it would turn out that the missile defence plan had reached the...

In a joint news conference, NASA administrator Michael Griffith and Gen. James Cartwright, the No. 2 officer at the Defense Department, announced that an SM-3 missile, designed to hit inbound ballistic missiles, will be fired from a Navy cruiser or destroyer during the next month to obliterate the inbound spacecraft. The idea is to break apart the satellite to rid it of toxic fuel onboard by smashing its tank, which is the largest intact piece left. If successful, it would be the first direct U.S. test against a satellite since 1985, when an F-15 climbed to 80,000 ft. to fire...

Come into our missile shield: US THE US wants Australia to join a global missile shield that could see interceptors and radar units based on Australian soil and new RAN warships working with the US Navy to protect vast areas of the region. A senior Pentagon official, JD Crouch, told The Weekend Australian he planned to visit Canberra later this year to explore options for Australian participation in the missile defence program dubbed Son of Star Wars. "We don't have any particular solution here," he said. "One thing would be the basing of ship-based systems (in Australia), there might be...

A last-ditch attempt by a group of lawmakers to resuscitate the defunct US-Russian Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty collapsed when a federal judge angrily threw out their complaint, arguing that members of Congress should not seek help from courts when they lose political battles. "...The court concludes that the treaty termination issue is a nonjusticiable 'political question' that cannot be resolved by courts," US District Judge John Bates wrote Monday in his opinion. "Accordingly, this action will be dismissed." The suit was brought last June by 32 members of the House of Representatives led by Ohio Democrat Dennis Kucinich, who asserted that...