It has a record of dismal failure. Fifty Nobel laureates have called it a waste of money that will jeopardise world peace. The White House privately hopes it will not work. But the US national missile defence project (NMD) is proceeding at full steam. In a test late tonight, the Pentagon will make its third attempt to shoot down a mock warhead over the Pacific Ocean.
If the test works there will be intense pressure on President Clinton to approve the first phase of the $60bn programme - known as the "son of Star Wars" - which comprises an array of radars, missiles and computers supposed to provide the US with a shield against missile attack by "rogue states".
The test has been manipulated to give it every possible chance of success. The $30m interceptor launched from Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific will "know" where the target is coming from and where it is heading. The mock warhead, which will take off 125 miles north of Los Angeles, will be travelling relatively slowly and will continually broadcast its position to the interceptor.
"It will be liking shooting ducks at a funfair," said Chris Hellman, a senior analyst at the Centre for Defence Information thinktank in Washington.
In the last try-out in January, the interceptor missed its target because of a cooling malfunction. According to critics and some of the Pentagon's own analysts, other tests have been rigged to cover up the fact that the interceptor has been unable to distinguish between warheads and decoys.
The vested interests in a success this time are enormous. No one wants to look "soft on defence" in an election year, and the lobbyists for the four major contractors, Boeing, Raytheon, TRW and Lockheed Martin, are lubricating its passage through an already enthusiastic Congress. A live broadcast at the test is to be hosted by Boeing.
"This thing is running us," said Alan Kliegerman, a leading Democratic party donor, and a board member of Business Leaders for Social Priorities. "Almost in its totality it's being pushed because the companies need the business."
Mr Clinton was initially opposed to resurrecting President Reagan's Star Wars nuclear umbrella scheme, but adopted a scaled-down version of the plan to steal the thunder of a rightwing Republican challenge in the wake of the 1994 congressional elections.
That plan envisaged an anti-missile shield based only in one place - in Grand Forks, North Dakota - where it would theoretically be allowed by the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty, one of the main pillars of global nuclear arms control.
But when it was discovered that that shield would not cover remote islands in Alaska, the Alaskan Republican senator, Ted Stevens, led a campaign for a bigger, far more expensive plan, with key installations in Alaska's Aleutian islands.
The NMD project in its current form would violate the ABM treaty. It has generated anger in Russia and China, unease in Europe, and alarm among many US scientists.
Fifty US Nobel laureates signed an open letter to President Clinton yesterday urging him to scrap the scheme.
"The system would offer little protection and would do grave harm to this nation's core security interests," the laureates wrote. The first to sign was Hans Bethe, a physicist who was one of the main architects of the atom bomb.
White House officials privately agree with many of the misgivings, and say that a failure tomorrow would be welcome, as it would make it easier for Mr Clinton to delay a decision committing the country to the scheme.
European governments, including the British, are desperately hoping that Mr Clinton will put off the decision on whether the test is deemed a success. Whitehall officials say that opposition within Europe to the project is increasing rather than diminishing, despite Washington's claims to the contrary.
Faced with the prospect of having to allow the US to build a radar system at Fylingdales in North Yorkshire, British ministers have refused to comment publicly on the project in an attempt to stifle debate.
Both the foreign secretary, Robin Cook, and Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary, repeat the mantra that they will "consider" proposals to build new US radar systems in Britain when they receive a formal request from the US.
But privately, Mr Cook and military chiefs are hostile to the NMD project. They believe that it will threaten existing arms control agreements, as well as being unnecessary and not technologically feasible.
In common with other European allies - notably Germany and France - Britain does not share the assessment by some elements in the US intelligence and military community of the threat posed by such countries as North Korea, Iran, and Iraq.
Mr Hoon came close to distancing himself from US calculations when he told the Commons this week that according to British assessments there was no significant threat to the UK from weapons of mass destruction.
A decision by Mr Clinton to leave a decision on NMD to his successor will give Europeans much-needed breathing space, said one Whitehall official. He conceded that a British decision to allow the US to upgrade Fylingdales would be "very difficult".
The US is already upgrading its eavesdropping base at Menwith Hill, near Harrogate in North Yorkshire, to install a space-based infrared radar system for the NMD project. But that base is already substantial. Building a large new radar system at Fylingdales will invite more protests, officials says.
British MPs are becoming increasingly unhappy about the government's continuing refusal to engage in a public debate on such a controversial development.
"NMD is a mad idea; it is unlikely to work technically and it will have a destabilising effect on world security", Phyllis Starkey, a Labour member of the Commons foreign relations committee, said yesterday. "America's 'rogue state' hypothesis just not credible."
The committee is expected to deliver a strong critique of NMD in a report due to be published next month.
America's European allies believe that the NMD project would provoke Russia into taking countermeasures. The latest issue of the authoritative US publication, Defence News, says that Moscow is seriously considering abrogating the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces treaty which led to the scrapping of many US and Soviet intermediate-range nuclear missiles in the 1980s.
The Europeans believe NMD would prompt China into building more long-range missiles which would provoke an arms race in south Asia.
They privately welcome the proposal from the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, for a system - to cover the whole of Europe - designed to attack incoming missiles soon after they have been fired.
Though this would be even more difficult technologically than Washington's NMD project, it would prolong the debate, and put off difficult decisions, Europeans hope.
NMD reflects an "erosion of the belief in deterrence", Dan Plesch, director of the British American Security Information Council, said yesterday. "The choice is between a new arms race or disarmament."
Europeans fear that the US has already taken the route leading to the former.
Assessing the threat
by Richard Norton-Taylor and Ewen MacAskill
The US justification for developing the new anti-ballistic missile system is a perceived threat from countries such as North Korea, Iraq, Iran and Libya. Throughout the 90s, these countries were labelled by the US as "rogue states", a term recently downgraded to "countries of concern". But how realistic is the threat?
Iraq: As a result of disarmament and international sanctions after the Gulf war, Saddam Hussein's arsenal has been severely depleted. Although it has short-range missiles, it does not possess long-range ones, nor does it have a nuclear capability. The only threat that could be posed to the US by Iraq is from chemical or biological weapons, which are unlikely to be delivered by missiles.
Iran: Claims not to be developing nuclear weapons. A senior Pentagon official acknowledged this week that Iran's ballistic missile programme had problems and was "certainly not clicking along really fast". Some US intelligence officials say Iran could threaten the US "before 2010".
North Korea: Even US experts are divided about the danger this nation presents. Some, like Europeans, point to its suspension of missile tests last year and recent talks with South Korea as positive signs.
Libya: It is fast losing its pariah image, with Britain taking a lead in moving towards normalisation of relations. Now seen as the least likely of the four to mount an attack on the US.
