U.S. official: Missile test 'still not realistic'

A vapor trail from the missile test as seen Friday from Northridge, California.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A successful U.S. missile defense system test completed this week did not realistically duplicate conditions of an actual attack, a top U.S. defense official said Saturday.

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said on CNN's "Novak, Hunt & Shields" that decoys used to try confusing the "kill vehicle" were not "as good a decoy [as] we expect to face later."

"We are in a development program. People need to understand that we are going to push with our success. We killed one program this year because it was not working well," Wolfowitz said.

"It [the system] is designed to be effective not against the massive attack we would have faced from the Soviet Union, but from the more limited capabilities these countries have," Wolfowitz added.

Wolfowitz appeared to agree -- at least in some small measure -- with an arms control advocacy group that said Saturday the latest test is "not that significant" and there is a long way to go before the nation has a reliable, workable system.

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"The Missile Defense Agency may have gathered some new information from this test. But it doesn't tell us whether missile defense will work under real-life conditions, and we won't know that for several years," Chris Madison from the nonprofit Center for Arms and Control and Non-Proliferation told CNN.

The center supports the mission of the Council for a Livable World, founded in 1962 by nuclear physicist Leo Szilard and other scientists who worked in the pioneer days of atomic weapons.

The test of the Ground-based Midcourse Defense System began Friday night with the launch of the ballistic missile from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. About 20 minutes later and 4,800 miles away, an interceptor was launched from Kwajalein Atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands.

The intercept happened about 10 minutes after the interceptor was launched, more than 140 miles above the central Pacific Ocean, the Pentagon said.

Out of six tests since 1999, Friday's test was the fourth to be successful in U.S. efforts to develop a shield against a missile attack from potentially hostile country.

Pentagon officials called it an integrated system test, meaning that all involved systems were scrutinized, including ground- and space-based radars and sensors as well as the "exoatmospheric kill vehicle," or EKV, the device that seeks out the ballistic missile.

The Pentagon said the EKV separated from its rocket booster more than 1,400 miles from the target warhead. After separation, it used onboard infrared and visual sensors along with radar data to locate and track the target.

The EKV successfully selected the target instead of the three balloon decoys, the Pentagon said.

But Madison said that except for the introduction of two more decoys Friday's test was essentially a repeat of those done last year in July and December.

"Our concern about these tests is that the American people are getting unrealistic expectations," Madison said.

"Based on a few successes in these tests, the Bush administration has promised to have missile defense ready to fire by 2004 from Alaska. That's absurd. They may have a missile in a silo by then, but they will have no idea whether it will work under realistic conditions. They won't have done the necessary operational tests," he said.

The first intercept test, on October 3, 1999, resulted in the successful intercept of a ballistic missile target. The second test, January 19, 2000, missed an intercept because of a clogged cooling pipe on the "kill vehicle."

The third test, on July 8, 2000, missed an intercept because of unsuccessful separation of the "kill vehicle" from the booster rocket. Both the fourth test, in July 2001, and the December test successfully intercepted the targets, the Pentagon said.