Can We Stop a Nuke? From the impossible dream of a space-based
shield, missile defense has come down to Earth. But will it
work? - By Ben Iannotta - Air & Space magazine, May 2007 Missile
Defense Agency (Page 4 of 7) Until new sensors are created,
finding the real warheads among the decoys requires a shotgun
approach: “If I can’t discriminate what’s a decoy and what’s a
warhead, I have to launch interceptors at both of those
objects,” Obering says. But in September 2006, the goal was to
direct a single kill vehicle to a single target warhead, using
upgraded tracking radar at Beale Air Force Base in California.
The Beale radar was built during the cold war to bounce radar
waves off incoming Soviet missiles with just enough fidelity to
tell the president: “We have a missile and it’s going to impact
in the New York or Chicago area,” Obering says. During the
hiatus between launches, the missile agency put engineers and
software experts to work installing new computer processors and
software to enable the cold war