THE controversial defensive shield against long-range missiles proposed by
the US is fundamentally flawed, warns a panel of physicists and engineers. They
say that simple decoys such as Mylar balloons could confuse the system and
prevent the missile hitting its mark. “It’s crazy to say we’re going to start
this whole deployment,” says David Wright, a senior scientist with the
Massachusetts-based Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), which commissioned the
report.
Unlike Ronald Reagan’s ambitious Star Wars programme, which would have fought
the Soviet Union in space, the new National Missile Defense (NMD) system is a
scaled-back version designed to protect the US from a limited attack by a “rogue
state”. It relies on ground-based interceptors that would collide with incoming
missiles at a speed of 24 000 kilometres per hour, vaporising them instantly
more than 300 kilometres above the Earth.
The full NMD system would cost an estimated $13 billion over the next
6 years. American radar systems at a base in Yorkshire would have to be
upgraded, though Britain would not be protected.
Advertisement
Now scientists affiliated to the UCS and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology have completed an independent technical evaluation of the plan. They
conclude that this “hit-to-kill” strategy is too easily fooled. “If you miss by
an inch, you miss,” says Wright, who is also a research fellow at MIT.
Attackers could enclose their nuclear warheads in Mylar balloons and send
over hundreds of similar decoy balloons at the same time. An interceptor would
not be able to figure out which ones contained nuclear warheads, the scientists
say. A biological or chemical attack could be delivered in thousands of tiny
bomblets, making interception by a simple impact impossible.
The system has so far been flight tested twice, using a decoy balloon both
times. In the one successful hit, the interceptor distinguished between the
target and the decoy “in a trivial way”, says Wright. “They had a warhead and a
big balloon. Those look very, very different.”
The Pentagon maintains that the UCS report exaggerates the problem. “It
wasn’t anything we didn’t already know,” says Rick Lehner, spokesperson for the
NMD programme. He says the programme is developing technologies against
countermeasures, but it’s hard to rebut critics, because the technology is
“highly classified”. “I don’t like the response `Trust us’, ” says chair of the
UCS panel Andrew Sessler of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in
California. “We really need tests to demonstrate capability.”
John Pike, a policy analyst at the Federation of American Scientists in
Washington, DC, thinks the report’s conclusions make sense. “They say it in more
detail and I would hope more persuasively than has been done in the past,” he
says. Bill Clinton says he will make a decision on deployment by the end of this
year, after at least two more tests.
