A New Missile Threat?

Industry experts believe the nation is vulnerable to a sneak attack from the sea, and the idea is gaining traction in Washington

The Pentagon has spent $92.5 billion during the past 20 years trying to build a shield for the nation against intercontinental ballistic missiles, even though few potential adversaries may have the capability to strike U.S. territory from their own soil.

But the military has spent very little to find a way to defend the country against a missile capability that perhaps a dozen unfriendly nations currently possess, and which soon could be in the hands of terrorists, some experts believe: relatively short-range ballistic or cruise missiles — perhaps armed with chemical, biological or even nuclear warheads — that could be launched from an innocent-looking merchant ship a hundred or so miles off the extensive U.S. coastline.

Lockheed Martin, however, has been spending its own money to develop a system, called Passive Coherent Locator (PCL), that could detect such a ship-launched missile and feed accurate tracking information into the existing national missile defense command-and-control system for a response.

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