Coot
01-02-2003, 11:28 PM
This article (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-530647,00.html) from the UK TimesOnline states that there's a hulabaloo brewing over at MIT with respects to the Missile Defense System and accusations of falsified test data.
The criticism is led by Theodore Postol, a physicist and missile defence critic at MIT, who has said that the institute is sitting on what is potentially “the most serious fraud that we’ve seen at a great American university”.
After months of demanding an inquiry into the affair, Ed Crawley, the chairman of MIT’s aeronautics and astronautics department, has reversed previous refusals and recommended an investigation.
Dr Postol and fellow critics say the ability of an interceptor missile to distinguish between an incoming warhead and the decoys likely to accompany it is deeply suspect. Any such doubts would cripple the credibility of the system.
Such questions date back to mid-1997 when the military contractor TWR Inc was accused by one of its employees, Nira Schwartz, of faking test results on a prototype anti-missile sensor meant to tell hostile warheads from decoys.
The article goes on to point out that while Postol is an active critic of the program, he is by no means a crackpot, as he was the first to challenge the effectiveness of the Patriot missiles, and he was correct.
Since 1999 three of the eight tests of “hit to kill” interceptors have failed. Critics say that wrapping a nuclear warhead in radar-absorbing rubber foam or releasing thousands of small pieces of metal would be enough to fool an interceptor.
Well, if as the article stated and the tracking technology is infrared, RF absorber or chaff would absolutely not be of much ECM value.
The criticism is led by Theodore Postol, a physicist and missile defence critic at MIT, who has said that the institute is sitting on what is potentially “the most serious fraud that we’ve seen at a great American university”.
After months of demanding an inquiry into the affair, Ed Crawley, the chairman of MIT’s aeronautics and astronautics department, has reversed previous refusals and recommended an investigation.
Dr Postol and fellow critics say the ability of an interceptor missile to distinguish between an incoming warhead and the decoys likely to accompany it is deeply suspect. Any such doubts would cripple the credibility of the system.
Such questions date back to mid-1997 when the military contractor TWR Inc was accused by one of its employees, Nira Schwartz, of faking test results on a prototype anti-missile sensor meant to tell hostile warheads from decoys.
The article goes on to point out that while Postol is an active critic of the program, he is by no means a crackpot, as he was the first to challenge the effectiveness of the Patriot missiles, and he was correct.
Since 1999 three of the eight tests of “hit to kill” interceptors have failed. Critics say that wrapping a nuclear warhead in radar-absorbing rubber foam or releasing thousands of small pieces of metal would be enough to fool an interceptor.
Well, if as the article stated and the tracking technology is infrared, RF absorber or chaff would absolutely not be of much ECM value.