Physicists Blast Planned European Radar

Two U.S. physicists say there is little value in the radar that would be deployed in the Czech Republic under the Bush administration’s plans for European-based missile defense installations, Reuters reported yesterday (see GSN, April 22).

The Raytheon Co.’s European Midcourse Radar “possesses such limited range that it won’t play any useful role in the operation of European missile defense,” program critics George Lewis of Cornell University and Theodore Postol of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said in the May/June edition of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

The U.S. Missile Defense Agency has “oversold” the radar and the wider missile shield in a fashion that could make it hard to back off the plan, the scientists said.

Czech leaders could formally agree next month to house the radar, though lawmakers there would have to approve the deal.

Raytheon has received a contract of up to $400 million to move an existing X-band radar from the Marshall Islands to the Czech Republic.  The radar is set to receive data processing, communications and software upgrades and to begin operations by 2013

“The radar proposed for placement in the Czech Republic has more than enough power for its role and has supported missile defense tests in the Pacific for nearly a decade over greater distances than will be required in Europe,” Missile Defense Agency spokesman Richard Lehner said by e-mail.

“Neither of the gentlemen involved in the analysis have access to detailed and likely classified missile defense technical data so I assume they are simply expressing an opinion regarding what they think they know,” he added.

Postol told Reuters that the Missile Defense Agency appears to assume that the cross-section of a missile fired by Iran would be up to one square meter in size and thus easily detectable.  That could be a significant overestimation, he said.

“It’s hands-down unambiguous,” he said.  “No ambiguity whatsoever that this radar will not perform as advertised” (Jim Wolf, Reuters/Yahoo!News, April 23).

The radar’s function would be to help guide Poland-based interceptors toward incoming missiles.  U.S. Lt. Gen. Henry Obering, head of the Missile Defense Agency, said yesterday he was “optimistic” of reaching a deal with Warsaw by the end of 2008, the Air Force Times reported.

That would allow construction of the European installations to begin by the end of 2009, he told lawmakers in Washington (John Bennett, Air Force Times, April 24).

Poland and the Czech Republic have not yet signed off on a U.S. plan intended to address Russian worries about the missile defense installations, RIA Novosti reported yesterday.

“What we have so far heard does not allow us to say that these countries are ready to accept measures proposed to us by the United States, in particular the permanent deployment of Russian officers to the facilities,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Tuesday following a meeting in Kuwait with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (RIA Novosti, April 23).

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