From the frigid blackness of space, banks of sensors locked onto the dot and followed it, as it arced upwards to the south and west, soaring 806 miles before falling into the sea. North Korea had fired a missile over Japan.

Within seconds, one, possibly two, HERITAGE satellites were downloading data to the CIA’s secret ground station at the Buckley Air National Guard Base in Aurora, Colorado. A giant SIGINT satellite (shaped like an umbrella the size of a baseball diamond) began feeding telemetry signals from the missile to the supercomputers at National Security Agency headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland.

Information was also pouring into the NORAD Missile Control Center, 1,800 feet beneath Colorado’s Cheynne Mountain, from a Defense Support Program satellite in geostationary orbit 22,500 miles above the earth.

And other machines were watching: an RC-135X COBRA EYE aircraft flying off the coast of Korea; a COBRA JUDY radar ship patrolling in the Sea of Japan. 
U.S. and Japanese officials would go on television that afternoon to denounce the launch, voicing alarm and  claiming surprise.

In fact, the launch was no surprise at all. U.S. satellites had photographed every inch of the Nodong launch site for years. And when North Korea finally lit the engines on their Taepo-dong I rocket, the entire launch, from liftoff to splashdown, was filmed, recorded, measured and dissected as thoroughly as any Super Bowl.

Phony claims of “surprise” aside, the North Korean launch did stir real concern in many influential circles. Sure, the Taepo-dong I is a puny, primitive rocket. The Taepo-dong II (still untested) is five times more powerful yet barely capable of reaching the Aleutian Islands with a nuclear warhead.

But the launch was a pointed reminder that a growing number of unfriendly nations like North Korea, Iran and Iraq are acquiring workable missiles, as well as chemical, biological and atomic weapons. 

That new reality prompted many policymakers to ask, “If the machines can see the missiles, can they also shoot them down?” 

The debate over a National Missile Defense system had begun.

Not Your Father’s Star Wars
“This is a limited system, very different than "Star Wars.’” Those were the first words out of Jim Evatt’s mouth when he sat down to talk about National Missile Defense. Everyone close to the program seems anxious to make the same point. 

Evatt is General Manager of NMD for Boeing, the program's prime contractor. Over and over he returned to that theme: NMD “builds on many years of technical work and research.”  It's not another "Star Wars." 

“Star Wars,” of course, refers to President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI): an anti-missile system Reagan claimed could defeat an all-out attack by the Soviet Union.

The $1 trillion-plus SDI earned the nickname “Star Wars” because its core technologies were radically futuristic and staggeringly complex: 4,600 tiny space robots and mammoth lasers. 

Few scientists who studied SDI believed it could possibly work. Evatt is correct: NMD is far more limited than that. 

Instead of shooting at thousands of missiles, NMD would defend against a few dozen missiles, tops. Instead of orbiting swarms of killer robots, NMD would resemble a high-tech skeet-shoot: it would spot a launch, track the missile and fire a warhead to knock it down.
 
That sounds simple, but there is nothing simple about shooting down a warhead traveling more than 4 miles-per-second. That's another point people close to the program seem anxious to make: NMD is pushing the limits of current technology, and there is a great deal of research and development to do before they can field a workable system.

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