North Korea has the capability to design and build an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), even though a Taepo Dong-2 missile failed in a 2006 test, a senior U.S. missile defense official said.
“North Korea has ICBM capability,” said David Altwegg, Missile Defense Agency (MDA) executive director. He spoke before the National Defense Industrial Association forum on sea-based missile defense.
Given the “scary” progress North Korea has made in developing a long-range missile, “an ICBM can’t be far behind,” Altwegg said.
But if North Korea is poised to create an ICBM, it also is true that MDA is developing a shield to protect the United States from a devastating missile attack that otherwise would “wreak havoc on a major population center.”
Had the North Korean test of the Taepo Dong-2 missile succeeded, so that the missile began arcing toward the United States, the American missile defense system would have obliterated the threat, Altwegg said. The Taepo Dong “would have been toast,” Altwegg said. “We were manned, ready.”
He also predicted that ever more nations will develop the capability to include countermeasures in warheads of their missiles.
Speaking for himself and not for MDA, Altwegg also said it is time to work jointly with allied nations on missile defense, including sharing sensitive missile defense technology. “We are very interested I cooperating with our friends,” he said. “We’re just going to have to accept some risk and share the data” — ballistic missile defense technology. “We have to be willing to exchange technology.”
While the United States this year will complete installing the Aegis ballistic missile defense system on 18 Navy cruisers and destroyers, there likely will be far more of the defensive systems on Navy ships by the 2030s, he indicated. He declined to predict just how many.
Ideally, he said, the best point to kill an enemy missile in its trajectory is just after it launches, in the boost phase. “Boost phase is the place to get the” enemy missile, he sad.
The U.S. boost phase kill system will be the Airborne Laser (ABL), which uses a high powered laser beam to obliterate the enemy missile just after it lifts off.
The Boeing Co. [BA] is prime contractor and provides the heavily modified 747-400 jumbo jet aircraft, while Northrop Grumman Corp. [NOC] provides the laser gear and Lockheed Martin Corp. [LMT] has contributed the beam control/fire control system that aims the laser beam at the threat missile.
Assuming that ABL successfully shoots down a missile in a test next year, that will leave the other potential boost phase system, the Kinetic Energy Interceptor, to transition to being part of the U.S. ability to take down enemy missiles in their midcourse trajectory, he said.
Altwegg and others on a panel would have discussed missile defense at greater length, but they literally were left in the dark when a violent thunderstorm killed the electrical power at the Army Navy Country Club near the Pentagon, leaving only emergency lights on in a ballroom filled with several hundred guests.