Visit our website: HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK --------------------------------------------- The Pentagon and the Professor: A Meeting of Unlike Minds Geoffrey Forden Saturday, September 1, 2001 WASHINGTON There is a Web site in Russia that the U.S. government claims contains classified information. You can read it, but if you think about what you read there and conclude that U.S. missile defense plans are bound to fail, the government will try to stop you. That is what is happening to Theodore Postol, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Defense Department does not like what Mr. Postol has been saying about missile defense - that it will not protect the United States even from primitive incoming missiles. To stop him from saying these things, it has stamped "SECRET" on letters he sent to then-President Bill Clinton and now to Congress. . The letters explained how data from the Defense Department's missile tests, now available on that Russian Web site, showed that a country - even one just developing intercontinental missiles - could sneak past a U.S. defensive missile shield and destroy a U.S. city. . What did Mr. Postol say in those letters? In 1998, a team of engineers and scientists wrote a report reviewing the data from the initial missile defense flight test. In it, they focused on the system's ability to pick out a real warhead from the accompanying balloons and other decoys. . The scientists included a table of probabilities for picking the real warhead and a graph from which that table was produced. Both the graph and the table are available in a number of places, including a Web site in Russia. . Mr. Postol took the graph and, using techniques now taught in high school, calculated the chances for picking out the correct warhead from the incoming objects. He got answers quite different from those the table showed. In fact, his analysis proved that it would be better to flip a coin in deciding which was the warhead than to use the data to try to pick out the threatening object. Then Mr. Postol noticed that if you took his numbers and added or subtracted them in just the right way, you could get the same numbers that were in the table. Of course, a scientist who cared about the truth would never have done what Mr. Postol said had to be done to reproduce the table. But that was just the point he was trying to make. . He sent his analysis as a letter to the General Accounting Office, the investigative agency of Congress, which is investigating not only allegations of fraud in the missile defense program but also Mr. Postol's assertions that the Defense Department tried nearly a year ago to silence him by intimidation. Several weeks later, the office requested that he resend it the same letter, but with references to fraud removed. The office then forwarded this letter to the scientists who worked on the original report, presumably for their comments. . In the past few weeks, the Defense Security Service has been investigating Mr. Postol's mailing of this letter. Why? Because the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization classified its content as secret. . The Defense Department has now ordered MIT to seize all Mr. Postol's materials related to those letters, or lose U.S. funding for defense-related research. . Why did the Defense Department classify Mr. Postol's letter? If he had been wrong in his calculation of the missile defense's chances for picking out a real warhead from decoys, his letter could have done nothing to harm the United States and would only have made him look foolish. If, as I believe, his calculations are correct, then he did nothing but use high school math to analyze information that is widely available over the Internet. . This incident raises serious concerns about how the government uses secrecy laws to suppress individuals who question policy. . If Mr. Postol's calculations are correct, the current missile defense system will never protect the United States. Policymakers and the public need to know about this. . The writer is a senior research fellow in the security studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a former principal analyst for missile defense issues at the Congressional Budget Office. He contributed this comment to The Washington Post. http://www.iht.com/articles/31090.html ------------------------------------------------- This Discussion List is the follow-up for the old stopnato @listbot.com that has been shut down ==^================================================================ EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84x2u.a9spWA Or send an email To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] This email was sent to: archive@jab.org T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================
