MIT professor to discuss
missile defense system
By Russ Brickey
Staff
Writer
The United States Department of Defense's $60 billion
missile defense system — designed to shoot down long range missiles
and safeguard the United States from nuclear attack — may not be
all it is cracked up to be
In fact, it may not work at all according to one
man.
In a recent speech, President George W. Bush declared
his administration's intention to continue research into the missile
defense system and even to expand the program to include sea-based launchings.
An outspoken critic of the project, Theodore A.
Postol, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and Star Wars
expert, will speak on campus Thursday afternoon about the impracticality
of this system.
"This is a case where the best people, not necessarily
the anti-establishment people, are against (the missile defense system),"
says Purdue physics professor Earl Prohosky. "And (Postol) is one of
the best people to have an opinion."
Postol's talk at Purdue will cover the "mid-phase"
defense system, which is designed to shoot down missiles in the near
vacuum of space before re-entering earth's atmosphere and the inability
of this system to tell the difference between a warhead and a simple
balloon decoy.
Postol, an award-winning scientist and former college
football lineman, has long been a thorn in the side of the electronic
defense industry.
In 1992, Postol challenged the Army's findings
that the Patriot Missile, a widely touted anti-short range missile defense
system, had a 96 percent success rate in shooting down Iraqi SCUD missiles
in the Gulf War.
Postol and an MIT colleague discovered most of
the Patriot missiles were failures, allowing still active SCUD warheads
to fall on the ground.
Postol's conclusions made national headlines and
the manufacturer of the Patriot system, the Raytheon Corporation, withdrew
$400,000 worth of research support from MIT.
Postol refused to back down and internal Raytheon
memos showed that Postol was in danger of losing his government clearance
from irate Army officials. It was only at the intervention of Congressman
John Conyers (D-Mich.), that Postol finally kept his clearance.
Then, in May 2000, Postol sent a letter to White
House Chief of Staff John Podesta, detailing allegations of failure
and even outright fraud when recent missile defense tests were conducted.
Among other claims in his letter, Postol pointed
out the inability of the system to distinguish between mock-warheads
and a decoy made of a balloon.
"The team performing the post-flight analysis dealt
with this failure by simply removing the balloon from the data, as if
it was never there," the letter said.
Pentagon officials accused Postol of disseminating
classified information even though the documents he used were widely
available on the Internet.
Postol also claimed the Defense Department threatened
funding of M.I.T.'s $319 million Lincoln Laboratory at Hanscom Air Force
Base in Massachusetts, which is under contract with the U.S. government
to do missile defense research.
When Postol went public with his claims the Pentagon
was attempting to silence him he again gained national headlines.
This colloquium, which is sponsored by the Physics
department, is scheduled for 4 p.m. Thursday in the Physics Building,
room 223.
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