Look! Up in the Sky! At Last!

After three failures, Pershing II is on target

It seemed, as Samuel Johnson once remarked about second marriages, "the triumph of hope over experience." Exuberant cheers and shouts of "Go, baby, go!" echoed across the base at White Sands, N. Mex., as the sleek dark-green Pershing II missile shot up, up and away last Friday in its first successful test firing. "I can tell you there was a sigh of relief back here," said Winant Sidle, a spokesman for manufacturer Martin Marietta. David Harris of the Army Missile Command, who had watched three previous tests go awry, wept as the missile disappeared in a corkscrew of smoke and headed downrange for 66 nautical miles over a desert dotted with sagebrush and yucca. "Congress told us we needed a good firing, and we got one today," he said, his voice choked with emotion. "The message was pretty clear."

The countdown had been nerve-racking, with gusty winds and thick clouds threatening yet another delay. "It's like your whole life sitting out there," said Technician Bill Wood.

But the launch of the missile with its dummy warhead went perfectly, and officials in Washington and abroad, who had been getting edgy about the misadventures of Pershing II, breathed easier. The Army has been rushing to ready the intermediate-range missile, nine of which are slated to be deployed in West Germany by December 1983, a year earlier than originally planned, as the centerpiece of the NATO arms buildup. Designed to fly 1,000 miles in six to eight minutes, the Pershing II will be the first nuclear weapon based in Western Europe capable of striking with accuracy deep inside the Soviet Union. The U.S. hopes to use it as leverage at the arms-control talks now under way in Geneva to persuade the Soviets to dismantle all intermediate-range missiles.

But when it came to getting the politically potent missile off the ground, Murphy's law prevailed. At its debut last July at Cape Canaveral, Fla., the first-stage motor malfunctioned, and after 17 seconds the missile exploded. The motor was redesigned, and a new version installed. At the second test, at White Sands on Nov. 4, the signal to turn on the missile's on-board batteries failed, promptly shutting down the Pershing and keeping it earthbound. Strike 3 came on Nov. 13 at White Sands, when an electrical connection blew out, and the test was postponed while spares were tested and inserted.

The already tight production schedule was squeezed tighter. Any delay in NATO deployment, warned West German Defense Minister Manfred Woerner on a recent visit to Washington, would "trigger very, very serious consequences." Under Secretary of the Army James R. Ambrose said last week that the missile is still on schedule, but wondered whether Europeans might conclude that it is defective. He hopes that a dozen successful test flights will restore its reputation.

While struggling to get aloft, Pershing II was also attracting critics determined to keep it grounded. Reviewing the Pentagon's budget request for the fiscal year ending October 1983, the House Appropriations Subcommittee early last week recommended withholding more than $500 million in production funds until the Pershing II has successfully completed its tests. After the missile's encouraging flight, however, it is unlikely that the full Appropriations Committee or the House will go along with such a cutoff.

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