U.S. Reports Successful Missile Shield Test

(Reuters) - A missile fired from a U.S. Navy Aegis cruiser knocked out a dummy warhead over the Pacific Thursday, the fourth intercept in five such tests of a sea-based anti-missile shield, the Pentagon said. The Standard 3 missile fired from the Lake Erie off Kauai in the Hawaiian islands "successfully engaged the target with hit-to-kill technology" about four minutes after the target was launched, said Chris Taylor, a spokesman for the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency

The Pentagon plans to spend $50 billion over the next five years to develop a missile shield, including components based on land, at sea, in the air in laser-firing Boeing Co. 747 aircraft, and in space.

story.news.yahoo.com... l=story&cid=564&ncid=564&e=1&u=/nm/20031211/ts_nm/arms_missile_test_dc_2

$50 Billion to be spent, is this Money well spent ?
I say yes. Even if we all disagee with this money being spent on this project, they'll keep on doing it, so I (we) should at least hope that it works !

here comes the new arms race.. what about the ABM treaty? how will russia and china respond to this? russia will probably relaunch some of its star-wars projects and china will just scram a few decoys on their icbms

The fact that the U.S. missile defence plan has caused unease in the Kremlin is also reflected in the statements made by the Russian Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov in March. He said that Russia would do "everything possible to counter these threats when they take shape". He further mentioned that missile defence would not become a reality until 2015-2020, and by then the Russian Army would have undergone a thorough overhaul. The fact remains that a U.S. reactivation of missile defence will trigger reactions from other countries along the same lines. Russian fears of an allout global arms race are very real as most countries will, by the logic of missile dynamics, get hooked into the race and into building missile shields.

Reports in Izvestia, the Russian daily, indicate that following the U.S. decision to withdraw from the ABM treaty Russia has begun work on its own missile defence system. The System-135 of the Moscow Missile Defence system is expected to undergo thorough restructuring within a year and installation work is expected to be completed at the Volga Radar Station near Russia's border with Belarus. The complete upgradation of the missile defence system is expected to be completed over the next few years. Reports indicate that there are plans to modernise the system's energy and mechanical equipment, a computer complex, transmitting and receiving devices and other systems.

[Edited on 11-12-2003 by SectorGaza]