Bull’s-eye!
One of the great technological adventures of the age.

July 16, 2001 1:20 p.m.

he two big video screens in the Pentagon conference room a little after 11 p.m. Saturday night were showing a green-and-white blotchy pattern, like when the cable goes out on your TV at home.

Except the reporters and the handful of Pentagon officials in the room were transfixed by the fuzzy screen, as if the test pattern were more interesting than any TV program. In fact, this static was the program.

Roughly 150 miles above the earth, an interceptor was hurtling toward an ICBM, the two rockets approaching each other at a speed 5-to-10 times that of a tank round.

If the interceptor hit the target, it would be an enormous boost for a missile-defense program that may help preserve America's ability to act in the world, and perhaps even one day save its cities from nuclear destruction. If not, well, let's just say Carl Levin and Vladimir Putin would be smiling.

So, everyone stared into the green-and-white fuzz as if it were one of those trick paintings you see at cheesy gift shops, paintings with a seemingly random pattern that turns into a unicorn or something if you look at it long enough. The image was from a heat sensor on a plane, and everyone was looking for a white flash that would mean a hit.

The blotchy pattern bristled with white and green spots, a psychedelic nothingness, until it finally flashed white and went dark, to the cheers of mission control, which we could hear over an intercom. The video switched to the command room on the tiny island where the interceptor was launched, where officers in camouflage and civilian clothes stood up from their seats and slapped and shook hands and hugged.

If missile defense weren't caught up in such a partisan fight, it would be considered one of the great technological adventures of the age — like the moon shot, except with the future of America's security possibly at stake.

Saturday night's test vindicated the approach of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to missile defense, proved that the basic technology is workable, and demonstrated how America's best scientific and engineering minds can still wrestle to the ground almost any technological problem.

Observing it all from the Pentagon was almost like watching an Austin Powers knock-off, with the alternating images of guys sitting at long rows of computer consoles and two rockets at different launch pads. We heard the scratchy rocket chatter that we all remember from the great lunar and space-shuttle launches — "T-minus seven and holding, do you copy?"

The target was launched from the Vandenberg Air Force base in California, 5,000-miles away from the Kwajalein atoll in the middle of the Pacific, where the interceptor would launch about 25 minutes later. The target ICBM took off in a bright orange plume of flame. The interceptor launched with almost no flash — some debris just flew off it, and it shot into the sky in a hurry.

Then, we watched them via telemetry, which produced an image of dotted lines of the sort you see broadcast in the cabin of transatlantic airplane flights, tracking how far you are from London or someplace. The target was a long red line arching over the globe, the interceptor a shorter green line inching toward it.

We couldn't know it at the time, but the interceptor, a snub-nosed thing of about 120 pounds, was marching through the test checklist nearly perfectly, on its way to a hit almost exactly when it was expected. A truly impressive performance (although all the details of the test won't be fully analyzed for weeks).

Critics have still found something to complain about. They argue that the interceptor had been programmed with information about how the target would look different from the decoy that was deployed from the ICBM — too easy!

But in a real-world situation the United States will of course have information about characteristics of possible incoming targets (the same way the silhouettes of enemy airplanes are provided to anti-aircraft batteries). Missile-defense critics will never be satisfied, no matter what: A deployed system could shoot down three North Korean missiles, and they would say it's "unworkable" because it hadn't shot down 300 Russian missiles.

But Saturday night's test validates Rumsfeld's strategy of making it a priority to pursue aggressively the most-advanced, ground-based part of a system, while generously funding the other technologies needed for a fully layered defense.

Pentagon officials emphasize that Saturday night was just one more test on a long road to an operational system, but the road will now be a little smoother politically — that was the message from 150 miles above the earth Saturday night.