- What would you do if you had a missile defense system
that couldn't tell a warhead from a balloon decoy? If you're the US Missile
Defense Agency, you'd classify the data about missile defense tests to
hide this fatal flaw.
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- In May of 2000, I wrote a letter to the White House that
described how the Missile Defense Agency had doctored results of National
Missile Defense tests to hide the fact that they could not tell the difference
between simple decoys and warheads. I also described how the agency had
altered its entire test program to hide the flaw. Two General Accounting
Office reports issued in March of this year verified the facts I provided
to the White House. The agency responded to my letter by claiming that
it was classified, and it engaged in multiple attempts to stop me from
revealing that its claims amounted to scientific fraud.
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- In one of these attempts, the agency tried to enlist
the help of MIT's president in order to seize research papers from my office,
and in another, it sent three agents to deliver a letter to me that was
classified ''secret.'' The letter contained nothing more than publicly
available information deemed classified by the government so that the agency
could claim that I would be violating security agreements if I continued
to speak about this matter of national security.
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- Now the agency wants to have the authority to, in effect,
classify the fact that it cannot tell warheads from decoys. It claims that
the nature of the decoys that experts know would easily confuse its defense
will now be classified.
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- The intent of this ploy has nothing to do with national
security. It is an admission that the only way it can save its unworkable
missile defense from reviews that will kill it is to hide information from
the public.
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- The current National Missile Defense interceptor tries
to identify warheads and decoys by ''looking at them'' with infrared eyes.
Because the missile defense is essentially using vision to tell which objects
are decoys and which are bombs, this technique is no more effective than
trying to find suitcase bombs at an airport by studying the shape and color
of each suitcase.
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- All of the objects that are seen by the missile defense
are in space, where there is no air-drag to cause light decoys to slow
up relative to heavy bombs. In addition, because there is no air-drag,
it is possible to wrap the bomb in light material and make it look like
a decoy. The possibilities for changing the visual appearance of bombs
and decoys in the near vacuum of space are virtually endless.
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- After the first two tests in 1997 and 1998, the agency
learned that decoys shaped like nuclear warheads - and even balloons with
stripes on them - could not be distinguished from actual warheads. The
agency responded by removing these decoys from all subsequent flight tests.
In one of the flight tests, the agency claimed a success in telling warheads
from decoys that was beyond expectations.
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- Later on, General Accounting Office investigators found
that the sensor in that test had failed to perform and that the claims
of success could not possibly have been true.
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- When the Department of Justice and the Department of
Defense inspector general were investigating the false claims of success
for fraud, the agency used researchers at MIT Lincoln Laboratory to create
a bogus study that had the effect of misleading the investigators.
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- In yet later tests the agency used a balloon that was
intentionally designed to be 10 times brighter than the bomb and claimed
that the fact that it could tell the difference between the bright and
dim objects meant it could tell warheads from decoys.
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- It neglected to explain that it had to know in advance
that the brighter object was a decoy, and if the warhead were placed inside
a large balloon it would then be indistinguishable from the empty decoy
balloon.
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- The agency has no technical program for solving this
fundamental problem. It has also been unable to provide any credible scientific
evidence or analysis to show that it can ever solve this problem. So what
it proposes to do is to classify the fact that the targets it is flying
have been preconstructed in ways that will allow it to tell one from another.
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- This misuse of the classification system to hide the
fact that the National Missile Defense System has no credible scientific
chance of working is a serious abuse of our security system.
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- A missile defense system cannot work unless it is based
on sound science. Classifying the fact that there is no sound science that
can be used to make this white elephant fly is a disservice to our democracy
and the American people.
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- Theodore A. Postol is professor of science, technology,
and national security policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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- This story ran on page A15 of the Boston Globe
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