Around the World

Israel hails launch test of new missile

Here was a supersonic specimen of Star Wars weaponry built to do what the American Patriot missile could not do in the Persian Gulf War - reliably shoot down incoming missiles at speeds up to two miles per second traveling 10 or 25 miles above the Earth's surface. It was, said the Arrow's backers, like designing "a bullet that could hit a bullet."

Israeli military men issued steely declarations of success that contained a warning to regional enemies such as Iraq, which fired 39 Scud missiles at Israel during the Gulf War, and Iran and Syria, which have developed long-range missiles of their own designed to reach the Jewish state.

"Yesterday was a bad day for haters of Israel," one unnamed defense official told the Israeli daily Haaretz, speaking

of Monday's test in which an Arrow prototype "destroyed" a computer-simulated target over the Mediterranean Sea after a 97-second flight.

At this point, the Arrow's ability to knock down an incoming missile traveling at up to nine times the speed of sound is still theoretical, since it has yet to be fired against a real target.

Searchers cannot find pieces of wreckage

Crash investigators said last week that five large sections of the plane had been located by sonar on the ocean floor off the Nova Scotia coast.

But divers working to retrieve aircraft parts and human remains say they have found no large pieces of the wide-bodied MD-11, which crashed Sept. 2, killing all 229 people on board.

09-17-98