Scientists Question U.S. Missile Defense System

Scientists yesterday expressed doubts about the capabilities of the U.S. missile defense system to provide protection against enemy threats, the Associated Press reported (see GSN, March 7).

“The program offers no prospect of defending the United States from a real-world attack and undermines efforts to eliminate the real nuclear threats to the United States,” program critic Lisbeth Gronlund, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in prepared testimony for a subcommittee of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

The system ultimately is intended to include land-, air- and sea-based assets around the United States and to involve cooperation with nations such as Israel and Japan.  The Bush administration has also been pressing to expand defenses into Europe (see GSN, April 15).

The program is estimated to cost between $213 billion and $277 billion between this year and 2025, said National Security and Foreign Affairs Subcommittee Chairman John Tierney (D-Mass.).  Tierney has sought to increase scrutiny of the system under the Democrat-led House.

“We need to all ask ourselves, whether you’re a conservative Republican or a liberal Democrat, are we wisely spending the taxpayer’s money here?” he said.

The system already has some ability to bring down missiles fired by an enemy nation and progress continues, said Jeff Kueter, president of the George C. Marshall Institute.

“Even in their current form, the elements of the U.S. missile defense system offer options heretofore unavailable,” he told lawmakers.  “With further research, development and testing, the accuracies and capabilities of these systems will only improve.”

Other experts argued that there has not been realistic testing of the system’s capabilities against long-range missiles and that decoys or other missile countermeasures would likely prove effective against the U.S. technology (Desmond Butler, Associated Press/USA Today, April 16).

“Missile defense is the most difficult development the Pentagon has ever attempted,” Philip Coyle, former weapons testing chief at the Defense Department, said at the hearing.

Coyle said the missile threat against the United States has been exaggerated, “and if it were real the proposed missile defense systems couldn’t deal with it anyway,” Reuters reported.

The developing Airborne Laser system, a weapon that would be deployed on a Boeing 747 jet, could be overcome easily, Coyle argued.

“If the enemy paints their missiles with an ordinary white paint, a white paint that is 90 percent reflective to the laser, then 90 percent of the laser energy bounces off,” he said, citing information from NASA and other sources.  “To compensate for this, the Airborne Laser would need to be 10 times more powerful and would need an aircraft bigger than a Boeing 747.”

The Missile Defense Agency refuted Coyle’s claim.

“That the U.S. would spend more than [$]4 billion on a weapon system that could be defeated by a coat of paint might make a good sitcom but has no basis in fact,” spokesman Richard Lehner stated by e-mail.

The agency has conducted five successful target intercepts “against the type of decoys we would expect from a country like North Korea or Iran,” Lehner said.  It believes it could deal with existing decoys and is continuing research on defeating countermeasures that might be developed in the future, he added (Jim Wolf, Reuters/Yahoo!News, April 16).

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