THE WORLD; Failure Can Be Successful
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Published: July 9, 2006
ON June 11, 1957, the Atlas, America's first Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, took its inaugural flight from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
It lasted 24 seconds. The missile roared off the launching pad and soared to about 10,000 feet before its engines failed. Tumbling out of control, the rocket fell through its own trail of fire before the safety officer on the ground sent a radio signal that told the wayward rocket to blow itself up.
The rocket's designers, though disappointed, learned a lot. It was clear that, despite the pummeling the Atlas took as it careered out of control, the rocket had remained intact. That proved its structural integrity, ending a major debate over the design's soundness.
Perhaps everyone can learn from failure, even the North Koreans.
Their missile, the Taepodong 2, took flight briefly last week, and seems to be in no shape to send an atom bomb whizzing halfway around the globe toward the United States. Experts judge that many years of testing beyond that inaugural flight on Tuesday will probably be needed before the North would entrust the new missile with anything as costly and precious as a nuclear warhead.
''It would take five or six tests of their final design before they'd be confident it could go someplace,'' said Harold M. Agnew, a former director of the Los Alamos weapons laboratory, which designed most of the nation's nuclear arms.
In the hours and days after the missile test Tuesday, military experts and administration officials expressed relief at the apparent failure, some calling the North Koreans inept. Stephen Hadley, President Bush's national security adviser, lightly disparaged the troubled launching, saying it ''tells you something about capabilities.''
But in interviews, arms and aerospace experts said that such setbacks were a normal part of rocket and warhead science. In time, they said, the North Koreans will likely make the vehicle reliable enough to wage intercontinental war.
''It would have been more surprising if they had a success'' on the first try, said John M. Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. ''Developing rockets is hard to do.''
The missile test, many said, was a reasonable step forward. ''The fact that something flies for 40 seconds before it blows up means the design is probably fundamentally sound,'' said Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard astronomer who publishes the online Jonathan's Space Report, which tracks global rocket launchings.
Even if failures cut short a vehicle's debut, Dr. McDowell said, the flight can ''give you an incredible amount of information about such things as how well your engines are working and what the aerodynamic stability of the vehicle is.''
If the North Koreans launched 10 Taepodong 2 missiles and none worked, he added, ''then you can make fun of them.''
In fact, the test flight was actually longer than at first reported. American military officials said on Thursday that the test flight's overall duration was closer to two minutes, not the 42 seconds initially reported.
Rocket experts said that, in general, new designs typically blow up repeatedly in flight tests before engineers can find and fix all the problems.
''It's a trial-and-error process,'' said Charles P. Vick, an expert on the North Korean rocket program at GlobalSecurity.org, a research group based in Alexandria, Va. ''They're trying to build and test to wring out the problems. It's the process any nation has to go through.''
Mr. Vick said that rocket designers typically conducted from 2 to 20 test flights before gaining reasonable assurance that a new model can be fairly reliable. Even then, he added, rockets declared operational often have failure rates of 1 in 10 or 1 in 20 flights.
So it's reasonable to expect that North Korea is busy learning from the failure, fixing flaws before it launches another Taepodong 2. South Korea's defense minister told reporters on Friday that the North appears to be holding another long-range missile near the launching pad.
The daunting nature of the aerospace game is reflected in other American programs, as well as American tragedies.
On Tuesday -- as the nation celebrated its birth and North Korea lighted the skies with its own red glare -- experts held their collective breath as the space shuttle Discovery blasted off with fire and thunder into a nearly cloudless Florida sky.
The winged spaceships, though considered highly reliable by industry standards, have failed catastrophically on 2 of 115 missions, killing a total of 14 astronauts, including the first teacher meant to fly in space. The space agency now puts the odds of disaster at roughly 1 in 100 flights.
Similar problems have dogged America's update of the ''Star Wars'' antimissile system, which is now based on land in California and Alaska, and is meant to shoot down North Korean missiles. It has hit targets in 5 of 10 tests, said Dr. Philip E. Coyle III, a former head of weapons testing at the Pentagon. ''That's the good news,'' he said. ''The bad news is that there's been no interception success for four years. And in the two most recent attempts, the interceptor never got off the ground.''
President Bush, asked Friday at a news conference about the North's missile firing, said he thought the nation's antimissile system ''had a reasonable chance of shooting it down.''
As for warheads, North Korea has declared publicly that it already possesses nuclear arms. But Dr. Agnew, the former director of Los Alamos, noted that the North Koreans appear to have never conducted a nuclear test -- often considered a necessary step to proving a weapon's reliability. ''Once they do that, it's serious,'' he said. ''Otherwise, they're just pulling our string.''
American intelligence agencies have told President Bush they believe the North has made enough fuel for six or more weapons, but it is unclear if it has been used to fashion warheads.
Dr. Agnew noted that if the North succeeded in developing a reliable warhead it would face a daunting series of technical hurdles in preparing to hurl it aloft. ''There's a lot of subtleties in missile-warhead mating that can affect the accuracy,'' he said of long-range targeting.
Missiles also have the inherent disadvantage of advertising where they arise. If the North Koreans really wanted to wreak havoc by sending a nuclear weapon overseas, Dr. Agnew said, they might consider loading it onto an inconspicuous boat.
''Most of our attractive targets,'' he remarked, ''are on the East Coast.''
Anthony H. Cordesman, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, estimated that the North Koreans might need five years to perfect a long-range missile. Its warhead, he added, would likely be a crude atom type rather than the much more destructive hydrogen type that powers the city busters of most global arsenals.
''It seems very doubtful that North Korea is close to a real-world capability to attack the U.S.,'' he said.
Dr. McDowell of Harvard agreed. ''Maybe they could do it five years from now, but that depends on how often they test,'' he said. ''It would be 5 to 10 years before I'd start to worry -- even a little.''
Photos: Blast Off -- North Korea produced this poster to celebrate its Taepodong 1 missile. The caption at the bottom reads: ''First sound of gunfire from big power.'' (Photo by Mainichi Shimbun/Associated Press)(pg. 1); Misfire -- In 1957, a United States Vanguard missile exploded seconds after takeoff. (Photo by Bettmann/Corbis)(pg. 4)