Bull's-Eye

The Tomahawk strikes

Guiding itself as if by magic, the sleek orange and white missile rose from the sea and homed in on a concrete bunker on San Clemente Island, a goat-infested expanse of sand and brush about 75 miles off the coast of Los Angeles. In its first live test against a land target, the Navy's sea-launched cruise missile, known as the Tomahawk, scored a bull's-eye. The building erupted in a blazing fireball that sprayed concrete fragments hundreds of feet into the air and sent tremors reverberating through arms-control circles.

Launched from a submarine in the Pacific Ocean, the Tomahawk took just an hour to fly the more than 400 miles to its goal on San Clemente. It was guided by its own internal computer, which was programmed with a detailed map of the route to the target area. The map included the shape of various landmasses and buildings along the way. At selected points once the Tomahawk reached land, the radar system in its nose compared the actual terrain with the internal map; then the computer would periodically correct the missile's course. This constant readjustment enabled it to zero in precisely on target.

The Tomahawk used in the San Clemente test was armed with a conventional explosive, but the missiles can be tipped with nuclear warheads. That presents a worrisome obstacle to arms control: cruise missiles, particularly those based at sea, are difficult to count, and there is no way to verify whether they carry nuclear warheads. But their deadly accuracy, as shown in the photos released last week, makes them potentially a very destabilizing weapon. The Navy plans to procure 4,000 sea-based cruise missiles. Last month it confirmed that it had begun installing nuclear warheads on some of them.