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Rumsfeld: US to Have 19 More Missile Tests in Five Years
US Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Monday that Saturday's missile defense test was only one of 20 such tests planned over the coming five years.
"These tests are designed to demonstrate that ballistic missile defense is no longer a problem of invention, but rather a challenge of engineering," Rumsfeld said in a vediotaped speech for an Army missile defense conference in Huntsville, Alaska.
"Future generations will look back on this time and see that we rose to this challenge," he said.
The defense secretary said the administration of President George W. Bush is determined to develop technologies for intercepting ballistic missiles of various ranges and in various stages of flight. "The technology to do so is within our grasp," he added.
A target missile equipped with a mock warhead was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California late Saturday. Twenty minutes later, the interceptor missile was launched from an island in the Pacific 4,800 miles away. The two collided in an explosion 150 miles above the ocean.
Two out of the three previous such 100 million dollars flight tests had failed. A fifth test is planned for October. Kadish said the next test might include added decoys to simulate a real attack.
Saturday's successful test boosted the Bush administration's effort to develop the missile defense system, but Democratic Senator Joseph Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and other opponents of missile defense questioned the reason for the missile test.
"It's kind of confusing to some of us and some of the experts out there as to what the purpose of this new test range is," Biden said on Fox News Sunday.
In testimony Monday on Capitol Hill, Rumsfeld responded to criticism that missile defense is consuming too large a share of the defense budget, which totals 296 billion dollars this year.
The budget for missile defense this year is about 5 billion dollars, and President Bush has proposed increasing it to 8.3 billion dollars next year.
The Defense Department is currently receiving something less than 2 percent of the gross national product of the United States and the missile defense budget is in total less than 2.5 percent of the defense budget, Rumsfeld told the House Appropriations defense subcommittee.
The test has provoked criticism from Russia, which argued that the test threatened a 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty.
"Why should the entire architecture of agreements in nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation, and its cornerstone, the 1972 ABM treaty, be put under threat?" asked Alexander Yakovenko, spokesman for Russia's Foreign Ministry.
Still, he said, Russia is open "for an early and substantive dialogue with the U.S. on the START [treaty] and ABM problems" and other strategic issues on the basis of understandings reached by the Russian and U.S. presidents at their recent meeting in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin are expected to discuss missile defense and existing arms control pacts when they meet next weekend in Italy at a gathering of leaders of the world' s industrial powers.
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