Up Front

99 Red Balloons
Or are they warheads?

Frances Richards
Managing Editor

I chanced upon a disturbing letter the other day in the August 2000 issue of Harper's Magazine. Written by Theodore A. Postol, a physicist at MIT and former scientific adviser to the chief of naval operations, it was addressed to White House chief of staff John Podesta. The subject matter included some rather frightening goings-on regarding the $60 billion National Missile Defense (NMD) system now under development. President Clinton will decide this fall whether or not to deploy the antimissile system, and Postol thought Clinton ought to know a few scientific facts beforehand. Especially since Russian president Vladimir Putin says that if the U.S. does indeed deploy such a system -- thus violating the 1972 Anitballistic Missile Treaty -- all bets are off regarding other arms-control treaties.

Postol states that he has obtained and analyzed the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization's (BMDO's) published data from the Integrated Flight Test-1A (IFT-1A) and has discovered that the Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle (EKV) will be "defeated by the simplest of balloon decoys." He goes on to state that he has documentation that BMDO in cohorts with its contractors then tried to hide this fact by tampering with the raw data and final analysis from this experiment. Postol says that the BMDO then modified the configuration of subsequent (IFT-2, 3, and 4) follow-on flight tests to disguise the "program-stopping facts" discovered in the IFT-1A. The gist of the discussion is that the EKV sees balloon decoys and warheads as unresolved points of light, and then tries to distinguish which are warheads and which are not by analyzing how these points of light change in time. The emitted signal depends on its source's size, surface materials, temperature and spatial orientation, and changes in the signal depend on how the orientation changes in time. In a near space vacuum, signals from both decoys and warheads look about the same, and there is no good way to tell them apart. Since this was the case, teams at BMDO had to invent new testing methods in order to achieve the desired result of the EKV actually being able to tell what is a warhead and what isn't. Postol concludes that when all the data from these experiments are properly interpreted, it becomes clear that the NMD system will be fooled by the simplest of countermeasures -- things like tumbling warheads, partially inflated decoys, and warheads and decoys with "rabbit-ear"-type add-ons.

Products and systems reviewed for Designfax seem stock full of components that could tell the difference between balloons and bombs, so why should the BMDO settle for anything less than an optimum system? I keep reading and hearing about the latest developments and technologies involving extremely sensitive sensors -- "smart" cameras, machine vision for high speed automation lines, "intelligent" sensor technology. Wouldn't any of these technologies raise the performance of the EKV? It is vigilance by the scientific community -- people like Theodore Postol and others -- that will defend us from our own defense system.

Frances Richards
Managing Editor
frichards@designfax.net