The Alaska Test Bed
September, 2001
In Summer 2001 the Bush administration proposed building a set of missile defense facilities in Alaska by 2004, including five silos to house national missile defense (NMD) interceptor missiles at Fort Greely in eastern Alaska. According to the administration, these facilities would serve both as: (1) a test bed to allow more realistic testing of the midcourse NMD system under development, and (2) an "emergency defense" should the United States be attacked by a small number of long-range missiles.
This paper shows that the facilities proposed at Fort Greely would serve no useful purpose for flight testing of the midcourse NMD system. Long-range missile interceptors would not be launched from Fort Greely, but would be transported to Kodiak Island for test launches, 500 miles away. Moreover, while launching target missiles from Kodiak might be useful to provide a different intercept geometry, launching interceptor missiles from Kodiak is not needed to allow more realistic testing.
Nor would the proposed Alaskan facilities provide even a minimal defense of the United States. The upgraded radars in Alaska could not discriminate warheads from even simple decoys and would not see attacks from North Korea on Hawaii.
