NATIONAL MISSILE DEFENSE WON'T WORK
The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Security Studies Program released the first major study presenting technical evidence that the planned US National Missile Defense (NMD) system would be defeated by simple responses from new missile states.
The report, by a panel of 11 independent senior physicists and engineers, also finds that the current NMD testing program is not capable of assessing the system's effectiveness against a realistic attack. "This so-called national missile defense system won't do the job," said report chair Dr. Andrew Sessler, former director of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and past president of the American Physical Society. "The United States should shelve its NMD plans and rethink its options for countering missile threats."
The NMD system is intended to defend US territory from attacks by tens of intercontinental-range ballistic missiles armed with nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. President Clinton is scheduled to decide on deployment this fall, after a third intercept test in June and a Pentagon recommendation in July. The first intercept test in October scored an ambiguous hit; the second test in January was a miss.
The report was researched by top scientists from Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, MIT, Cornell University, the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Maryland, and the University of Pennsylvania. Study members include senior defense consultants to the US government and nuclear weapons laboratories, and former members of the Defense Science Board, the Rumsfeld Commission, and the Lockheed Corporation.
The scientists used physics and engineering calculations to analyze both the planned NMD system and the simple steps--known as "countermeasures"--that nations developing long-range missiles could take to foil the defense. For biological or chemical weapons, the missile warhead can be divided into many small bomblets that would be released from the missile early in flight and overwhelm the defense with too many targets. The analysis in the report shows that the technology for bomblets would be readily available to an emerging missile state. "Any long-range missile attack with biological weapons would surely be delivered by bomblets," said Dr. Kurt Gottfried, a physicist at Cornell University and chair of the Union of Concerned Scientists. "The planned NMD system could not defend against such an attack."
The report also finds that attackers using nuclear weapons could defeat the system by deploying their warheads inside mylar balloons and releasing many empty balloons along with them, presenting the defense with an unwinnable shell-game. Or a nuclear warhead could be covered by a shroud cooled to very low temperatures, preventing the heat-seeking interceptor from detecting and homing on the target.
The US intelligence community, in a September 1999 report, also found that developing nations could deploy countermeasures with their long-range missiles and would be motivated to do so by US NMD deployment. "Any country that can deploy a long-range missile with a nuclear or biological weapon can deploy these countermeasures," said Dr. Lisbeth Gronlund, a physicist at UCS and MIT. "Pentagon claims that the system can deal with countermeasures simply do not stand up to technical scrutiny."
The study shows that the NMD testing program will not be able to determine if the system would be effective against these countermeasures. Tests against realistic targets will not be conducted before the first phase of deployment in 2005, if at all. "Since we find that even the full NMD system would be defeated by realistic countermeasures, it makes no sense to begin deployment," said Dr. Sessler. "A defense that doesn't work is no defense at all."
See <http://www.ucsusa.org/> for the full text of the UCS/MIT report "Countermeasures: A Technical Evaluation of the Operational Effectiveness of the Planned US National Missile Defense System."
As a companion to the new report, UCS produced an animation that shows how straightforward devices like balloons and bomblets would confuse the NMD system. The animation and report can be viewed on the UCS website at <www.ucsusa.org/arms>. Contact: Tom Collina or Paul Fain, Assistant Press Secretary, at( 202) 332-0900.
--UNION OF CONCERNED SCIENTISTS, 2 Brattle Square, Cambridge, MA 02238, (617) 547-5552. Contact us at <ucs@ucsusa.org>.