Fire breaks out at new Hong Kong airport
     HONG KONG - April 29, 1998 12:37 p.m. EDT - A fire broke out at
 Hong Kong's new Chek Lap Kok airport on Wednesday, a government
 spokeswoman said.
     The $20 billion showpiece airport, built on reclaimed land, is
 scheduled to start operations on July 6.
     "The fire broke out at around 9:30 p.m. at the passenger
 terminal building," the spokeswoman told Reuters.
     Firemen at the scene were fighting the blaze, which started in
 a machine room on the sixth floor of the building, she said.
     "No one is known to have been injured," another government
 spokesman said.
     No other details were immediately available.
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           Pentagon set to award missile-defense contract
     WASHINGTON - April 29, 1998 7:37 p.m. EDT - The Pentagon will
 announce on Thursday the initial winner in a multibillion dollar
 aerospace industry battle to develop a space-age system to defend
 the United States against ballistic missile attack.
     Boeing Co. is competing against a team headed by Lockheed Martin
 Corp. to design and perhaps one day deploy such a system. The initial
 contract is expected to be worth $1.5 billion over three years.
     But the winner will grab the lead in an ambitious National Mis-
 sile Defense (NMD) plan, pushed by Congress, that could be worth $10
 billion in the next decade, including a separate competition to build
 a rocket-fired weapon to hit missile warheads in flight.
     Lockheed, teamed with Raytheon Co. and TRW Inc. in the United
 Missile Defense Co., is competing with Boeing to integrate weapons,
 radars and communications for NMD, which many experts say cannot be
 made foolproof against nuclear or other missile attack.
     Indeed, the initial contract for design and integration of the
 system may never get past the development stage if the military and
 aerospace firms cannot build a weapon to shatter warheads that ap-
 proach with eye-blink speed in space.
     "There is no room for error. This thing has to work the first
 time (against an attack) or it's worth nothing at all," said John
 Pike, a skeptical analyst with the private Federation of American
 Scientists in Washington.
     The idea, which grew from former President Ronald Reagan's more
 ambitious "Star Wars" program to protect U.S. cities from a massive
 Soviet nuclear attack, is now aimed at stopping a smaller attack or
 accidental launch by another country against the United States.
     The United States has spent about $50 billion with little success
 on nuclear missile defense since Reagan suggested his plan more than
 a decade ago.
     The U.S. military is also currently trying to develop an even
 more limited Theater Missile Defense (TMD) program to protect troops
 and bases from missile attack around the world.
     But that program has suffered four successive failures by Lock-
 heed Martin's proposed anti-missile weapon because of technical and
 other glitches.
     The firms involved in the national defense program are betting
 with high stakes that they can solve major technical problems because
 the monetary rewards will be major.
     Boeing and Raytheon are involved in a separate competition to
 develop an anti-missile weapon that could be fired using a ground-
 based rocket to hit warheads in space. That weapon, dubbed the "exo-
 atmospheric kill vehicle" (EKV), is still in the early stages of
 development.
     The Clinton administration is moving slowly on a national missile
 defense program despite heavy pressure from Congress, which wants to
 deploy a system as quickly as possible.
     The White House and Pentagon have promised to devote three years
 to development of NMD. They say that if it works, a decision could
 be made in 2000 or 2001 to deploy the defense within another three
 years.
     But Pike and others say the odds are high against a foolproof
 system. They include a Pentagon panel of experts who recently said
 that the military and aerospace firms were pressing ahead too quickly
 with poorly tested technology.
     Aside from an anti-missile weapon itself, analysts say that co-
 ordinating radars and sensors to identify, track and discern actual
 warheads from "dummy" decoys in space is an extremely difficult
 task.
     "The Lockheed weapon certainly has not been marred by success,"
 Pike said in an interview with Reuters on Wednesday.
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