Physical Society Colloquium

The Science and Technology of the
US National Missile Defense System

Theodore Postol

MIT

The currently being developed National Missile Defense System is designed to intercept nuclear warheads at high altitudes in the near vacuum of space. This design feature makes the defense extremely vulnerable to very simple decoy countermeasures that need only work in the near vacuum of space. The defense-interceptors - called homing kill vehicles - try to discriminate between warheads and decoys by analyzing the infrared signals from distant real and false targets during a period of roughly 60 seconds from target acquisition to flyby. Not surprisingly, experimental data on targets and decoys taken in two early missile defense experiments revealed that relatively simple infrared decoys could not be discriminated from warheads. Much of the data from one of these experiments was censored by the missile defense government contractor with the knowledge and approval of Department of Defense managers. In addition, an analysis of meaningless data was constructed to create the appearance to non-specialists that the kill vehicle would be able to discriminate between warheads and decoys, and analysis that showed the system could not discriminate was concealed from scientific review. This talk will describe how the US National Missile Defense is supposed to work and how test results from the program have been presented to make it appear that the system could function. In addition, evidence will be shown that the entire test program was altered to hide the fact that the defense-system can not function against the simplest of decoys.