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Pentagon officials rigged a key experiment designed to prove that ‘Star
Wars’ technology worked, investigators working for the US Congress revealed
last week.

The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, says
that the deception concerned the Homing Overlay Experiment (HOE), which
was carried out in the 1980s. In a series of tests, the heat-seeking HOE
missiles were launched from Kwajalein atoll in the Marshall Islands to intercept
and destroy missiles launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
The first three tests failed, with the HOE missile sailing past its target.
Officials working on the project decided to fix the fourth and final test.

To improve HOE’s homing instinct, they heated the nose of the ‘enemy’
missile before launch, providing a stronger signal for HOE’s infrared sensors.
The test was also changed so that the HOE missile approached its target
from the side rather than head-on.

In the fourth test, on 10 June 1984, the HOE dutifully struck its target,
creating a burst of light above the Pacific Ocean. Pentagon officials repeatedly
cited this as evidence that in the future they would be able to ‘hit a bullet
with a bullet’.

The GAO’s findings enraged Senator David Pryor, an outspoken critic
of the Star Wars programme. ‘They claimed to hit a bullet with a bullet,
when it was more like they hit the broad side of a barn with a bullet,’
says Pryor, who commissioned the report.

John Pike of the Federation of American Å®ÉúСÊÓƵs, another frequent
critic of Star Wars, says the revelations call into question the widespread
belief in government circles that the billions of dollars spent on Star
Wars brought significant technological advances that can now be applied
to more conventional warfare. ‘There is a real credibility gap,’ says Pike.

Earlier flights in the HOE programme had also been rigged. The General
Accounting Office confirmed admissions by the Pentagon, made last autumn,
that explosives had been secretly placed on the first two HOE missiles so
that if the missiles failed to hit their targets the explosive would detonate.
From the ground, it would look as if the missiles had intercepted their
target as planned.

But this deception did not work. The first two HOE missiles, in May
and December 1983, were so wide of their mark that no Soviet observer would
have been fooled by the ruse.

After 1984, the Star Wars team began to tire of the deception, say the
congressional investigators, partly because they began to think HOE would
never get close enough to its targets and partly because the deception was
increasingly hard to conceal from technicians. There was also a chance that
the Russians would discover what was going on.

At the Pentagon last week, reaction to the report was muted. The Star
Wars enthusiasts of the Reagan and Bush years have long since been replaced
by people appointed by Bill Clinton, who is not sympathetic to the idea
of defensive missiles. The Pentagon says that it ‘concurs’ with the report’s
conclusions ‘without further comment’