http://www.ucsusa.org/global_security/missile_defense/page.cfm?pageID=1403The multibillion-dollar U.S. ballistic missile shield due to start operating by Sept. 30 appears incapable of shooting down any incoming warheads, an independent scientists' group said on Thursday.
A technical analysis found "no basis for believing the system will have any capability to defend against a real attack," the Union of Concerned Scientists said in a 76-page report titled Technical Realities.
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The Missile Defense Agency "appears to be picking numbers out of thin air," the report said of past Pentagon assertions of a high probability of shooting down targets.
"There is no data to justify such an assumption," added the scientists' group, which is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Its findings dovetailed with an audit last month by Congress's General Accounting Office (news - web sites) that said the system's effectiveness would be "largely unproven" when the initial capability goes on alert.
http://www.space.com/news/missile_defense_000523.htmlNow, accusations of a cover-up are fueling the criticism. Theodore Postol, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology science professor who studies national security policy, says he has documents showing that crucial data in an early test of the system were removed to make the results appear successful.
The tampered data "clearly indicate that they have no way to discriminate between the balloons and the warhead," Postol said. "They tampered with the data."
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0713-06.htmTens of billions of dollars have been spent developing ground-based, sensor-equipped rockets — "kill vehicles" that would intercept and destroy incoming warheads — the first of which is to be installed in the fall of 2004.
There's just one problem, according to Postol, a 57-year-old missile systems specialist at Boston's Massachusetts Institute of Technology: They do not, cannot and will not work.
The system is fatally flawed, he says, because the sensors are incapable of distinguishing between a missile and a decoy — and decoys would be part of any enemy attack.
Postol charges that the findings were manipulated by the contractor, TRW Inc.
Moreover, when MIT's prestigious Lincoln Laboratory was asked to review TRW's research, rather than risk millions a year in government funding, it rubber-stamped the work.
Or, as the blunt-speaking physicist prefers to put it: "They lied and concealed evidence. They covered up a scientific fraud. They may be in criminal violation."