Nuclear Missile Deception: Corruption and Conflicts of Interest in the National Missile Defense Program
by William D. Hartung & Michelle Ciarrocca
The spectacular failure of the Pentagon's latest National Missile Defense (NMD) test on July 8th dramatically underscores the fact that this deeply flawed program is simply not up to the task of defending the United States from even a small number of ballistic missiles armed with nuclear warheads. The NMD project has now failed two of its first three "hit-to-kill" tests, in which an interceptor vehicle is supposed to destroy a mock nuclear warhead in mid-flight. And even in the one "successful" test, last October, it was later revealed that the interceptor vehicle had originally honed in on a large, brightly illuminated decoy balloon that in effect helped guide it to the mock warhead. Despite this dismal track record, the Clinton administration is still seriously considering moving towards deployment of an NMD system by preparing to award contracts for long lead-time procurement to begin construction on a key NMD radar system in Shemya, Alaska in the spring of 2001.
"We rigged the test," the scientist said. "We put a beacon with a certain frequency on the target vehicle. On the interceptor, we had a receiver." In effect the scientist said, the target was talking to the missile, saying, "Here I am, come get me...The hit looked beautiful, so Congress didn't ask any questions."
Scientist involved in the Pentagon's June 1984 missle defense test, quoted by Tim Weiner, New York Times, August 18, 1993What's the rush? Why move full speed ahead on a system with no demonstrated capability for actually protecting the United States against ballistic missiles? The short answer is politics. In the short-term, the Clinton administration is seeking to inoculate Al Gore from Republican charges of being "soft on defense" by throwing money at the defense budget generally and missile defense projects in particular. But now Vice President Gore, who has tried to carve out a reputation for himself as a knowledgeable reformer of costly and inefficient government programs and practices, is in danger of being charged with being "soft on defense contractors" as he stands by in silence while billions of dollars of missile defense contracts are doled out to companies that have records of fraud, corruption, and mismanagement. Given their recent performance, it would be risky to buy a used car from these companies, much less trust them to build one of the most technically demanding and costly weapons programs ever undertaken by the Pentagon.
Fraud is nothing new in missile defense research. But the Clinton Administration's National Missile Defense initiative is permeated with fraud to a degree not seen since the heyday of Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) in the 1980s. Under persistent pressure from conservative true believers and cash-hungry contractors, the Clinton/Gore NMD plan has been an ad hoc undertaking from the start, characterized by scientific fraud, exaggerated threat assessments and political manipulation. We can only hope that the mounting revelations of fraud and mismanagement in the NMD program will force Congress, the Executive Branch, and the defense industry to stop the mad rush to deploy this dangerous and ill-conceived system BEFORE U.S. taxpayers waste tens of billions of dollars pursuing what John Isaacs of the Council for a Livable World has aptly described as "a new Maginot Line."
On March 7th of this year, in a front- page article entitled "Ex-Employee Says Contractor Faked Results of Missile Test," New York Times science writer William Broad revealed that Nira Schwartz, a senior research scientist at TRW, had filed suit against the company alleging that she had been fired for refusing to falsify basic research findings on the essential question of whether an NMD interceptor could tell the difference between a decoy and a nuclear warhead. On May 11th, after conducting the only independent scientific analysis to date on test data released pursuant to Dr. Schwartz's lawsuit, Dr. Theodore Postol of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology sent a letter to White House Chief of Staff John Podesta presenting evidence of "criminal fraud" in the NMD testing program.
More than two months later, after another failed NMD test, Dr. Postol's charges have yet to yield a serious, substantive response from the Clinton administration. Instead, the Pentagon and the White House have countered with political spin control, arguing that Dr. Postol would change his mind if only he knew of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization's (BMDO) full, classified plans for addressing the decoy problem. The Department of Defense has also engaged in a clumsy and counterproductive effort to chill public discussion by declaring Postol's May 11th letter itself to be classified.
At a May 25th press briefing in Washington, DC, Postol urged the White House to "stop playing politics with an important decision that directly affects the security of the nation," and called for the establishment of "a team of scientists who are truly independent in their fields and independent of the Pentagon . . . to look into this matter." Postol urged the Department of Defense's Inspector General to "investigate and determine whether the BMDO classified the May 11, 2000 letter to the White House in order to hide waste, fraud, and abuse in the BMDO."
While the White House has failed to act on Postol's charges, they have resonated on Capitol Hill, where 53 House members, led by Representatives Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) and John Conyers (D-MI) have called for an FBI investigation of potential fraud in the NMD program. Meanwhile, Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL) has put forward an amendment that would require the Pentagon to test the NMD system in realistic conditions against multiple decoys before making any decisions about deployment.
Durbin's amendment responds in part to further revelations by Postol regarding the Pentagon's "dumbing down" of the test series for the NMD interceptor from now through 2005. Postol persuasively demonstrates that the BMDO redesigned the test series to purposely exclude the numbers and types of decoys that the interceptor had been unable to tell from the mock warhead during preliminary tests. In fact, Postol noted, the large, balloon- shaped decoy that had played a part in the only successful NMD intercept to date acted not as a decoy but as a "beacon" which assisted the kill vehicle in its efforts to locate the mock warhead.
The test of July 8th was no better -- it failed despite the Pentagon's best efforts to ensure a positive outcome. As Mark Thompson noted in the July 10th issue of Time magazine, the latest test of the system used a similar decoy to the one that served as a beacon in last fall's test (the decoy balloon failed to inflate during the test). In addition, the other parameters of the test were so carefully scripted that Thompson rightly suggested that the experiment is all but rigged:
"There are virtually no unknowns in the procedure. The Pentagon knows the type of rocket launching the target as well as the nature of the target; it knows how powerful the rocket's engine is, where it is coming from, and when it is being launched. The crew launching the interceptor will even get to listen in on the countdown of the warhead's rocket as it takes place. All that is valuable intelligence ‹ and much, if not all of it, would be denied to the U.S. if a rogue state decided to strike. Such advantages Śplace significant limitations' on the value of the test, says Philip Coyle, the Pentagon's chief weapons tester."
If the NMD system can't even pass a test that is "all but rigged," how would it fare in a more realistic test environment involving multiple decoys? The extreme difficulties involved in discriminating decoys from warheads and the inadequacy of the Pentagon's current testing regime have been highlighted in a major joint study by scientists affiliated with MIT and the Union of Concerned Scientists, in a statement by the American Physical Society (the largest organization of physicists in the U.S.), and in a recent letter by 50 American Nobel Laureates, organized by the Washington-based Federation of American Scientists which also underscores the strategic risks of proceeding with NMD. But, much like Richard Nixon's "secret plan" for peace in Vietnam, the BMDO's sole response to this avalanche of informed technical criticism has been to claim that it has classified plans for dealing effectively with decoys that cannot be revealed at this time for fear of tipping off potential adversaries.
The Pentagon's continued stonewalling in the face of valid technical critiques of NMD underscores the need for an independent assessment of the program by scientists and organizations that do not stand to profit by ignoring the system's glaring weaknesses. Unfortunately, the NMD testing program as currently structured does just the opposite: it maximizes the authority and influence of companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon, which stand to make billions of dollars if a decision is made to go full speed ahead towards deployment.
Nonstop Money Dispenser: The Corporate Role in NMD FraudSince Ronald Reagan gave his March 1983 speech touting a new missile defense program that could render nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete," the U.S. has spent over $70 billion researching and developing the various mutations of missile defense.
According to the Congressional Budget Office the first two phases of the Clinton administration's NMD system will cost taxpayers at least another $60 billion (counting the costs of dual use communications and tracking satellites). The Council for a Livable World has suggested that the multi-tiered approach favored by George W. Bush could cost $120 billion or more. Even by the standards of the Pentagon, that's a hell of a lot of money.
For the four "lumbering behemoths of the apocalypse" -- the military mega-firms Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, and TRW, which despite splitting over $30 billion per year in Pentagon contracts are still struggling financially -- a lead role in the NMD program offers a glitzy new set of projects and a major stream of potential new revenues to lure back investors and skilled personnel who have been turned off by the companies' recent track records of corruption, cost overruns, and mismanagement. These four companies dominate the missile defense program at this point, accounting for 60% of total missile defense contracts issued by the Pentagon during the last two fiscal years -- a total of over $2.2 billion during that time period. Since the results of the missile defense tests they are helping to carry out will determine whether they start reaping lucrative, multi-billion dollar NMD production contracts, these major corporate players in the NMD testing program have serious and direct conflicts of interest.
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