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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

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fredmoore - 12:45pm Oct 8, 2003 EST (# 14659 of 14663)

Will,

You mean these guys lie to us? Gee!

I'll do some research and get back.

wrcooper - 12:52pm Oct 8, 2003 EST (# 14660 of 14663)

Fred

It might be interesting to folks to quote from the same report you linked on the problem of discrimination:

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Discrimination: The Real Showstopper "Discrimination"-the ability to distinguish real warheads from decoys-seems to be the most complex and controversial technological hurdle. The fundamental realities are twofold. First, the system has to confront an incoming missile whose purpose is to fool the interceptor into going after one of many relatively sophisticated decoys. Second, the general performance characteristics of the U.S. EKV-its sensor array and communications links-are known, which can make the task of fooling the EKV easier.

The current NMD system is focused on mid-course intercept of the incoming threat, which is generally predicted to be a nuclear warhead. But should the hostile missile's payload consist of bomblets filled with biological or chemical agents, there would be too many "warheads" for the NMD defender to take out.

Even with a nuclear warhead, the discrimination task is formidable. The warhead could be enclosed in a Mylar balloon and be accompanied by a number of similar but empty balloons. Dr. Theodore Postol, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, strongly believes that in the almost complete vacuum of space the EKV would be incapable of distinguishing the real warhead from a fake. The EKV "sees" these objects only as light points and evaluates their "size, temperature, surface materials, and orientation in space." Dr. Postol says that the full data collected from the 10 object fly-by test (IFT 1A) showed that the "changing spatial orientation of the decoys and warheads. . . was nearly the same" and "fluctuated in a varied and totally unpredictable way." Thus there is "no fluctuating feature. . . that could be used to distinguish one object from the other." And Dr. Postol says that the EKV sensors, which are programmed to measure fluctuations in the intensity of light, first identified a partially inflated balloon as the target and then two other "benign" objects that were brighter than the actual mock warhead. Yet because of the combined closing speed of 15,000 miles per hour (approximately 4 miles per second), the EKV must make the correct choice relatively early. The following indicates how hard this may be, according to Dr. Postol: At 625 miles (1,000 kilometers) distance the EKV sensors have a resolution of between 488-975 feet (150-300 meters). At just over 6 miles out (10 kilometers) the resolution is still only 4.9-9.8 feet (1.5 to 3 meters). A warhead similar to the Mark 12A used on U.S. Minuteman missiles is only 6 feet (1.83 meters) long with a base of 22 inches. At 2-4.5 miles (3-6 kilometers) separation distance, the EKV has under a half second to maneuver before impact. BMDO refutes Dr. Postol's analysis as it does the judgment that it cut the number of decoys to four and then to one for the intercept attempts in order to improve the chances for successful discrimination. (Dr. Philip Coyle, head of the Pentagon's Office of Operational Test and Evaluation, who is himself a frequent critic of NMD, has supported their denials that the early tests had been rigged.)

Dr. Postol is not the only expert who believes the Pentagon has not been forthcoming with information. Michael Munn, retired Lockheed chief scientist who worked on NMD and headed the teams that scored the hit-to-kill "successes" in 1984 and 1991,1 recently said: "Discrimination looks easy when you do it on paper. But you get up there and you never see what you expect-the data never agree with the predictions. The only way to make it [the testing] work is to dumb it down. There's no other way."

General Ronald Kadish, the current Director of BMDO, relies on the most recent "Welch Report" to buttress his position that the best approach to NMD development is an incremental one: although "desi

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