Dresden 2000 – scientific programme

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AKA: Physik und Abrüstung

AKA 1: Raketenabwehr und Modellierung

AKA 1.2: Invited Talk

Thursday, March 23, 2000, 15:00–16:00, G 38

Countermeasures and National Missile Defense — •Ted Postol — Security Studies Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge MA, USA

The United States intends to build a National Missile Defense aimed at emerging ballistic missile states. The postulated threat from these states assumes only the technological capability of producing early generation ICBMs and nuclear weapons, below that of Russia and China.

However, states that have such a capability could also build a wide variety of countermeasures that could readily defeat the current baseline US National Missile Defense. Among these are: shrouds to make warheads stealthy to radars and infrared sensors; empty balloons accompanying warheads within balloons to create too many targets; very light cone shaped decoys that are credible targets to radars, infrared and optical sensors; obscurants to defeat infrared homing defense-interceptors; "traffic decoys" to defeat the precision tracking required of defense-radars; chaff, rope, and spooled wire to defeat radar discrimination; and lofted or depressed trajectories.

These "facts of technological capability" therefore raise profound questions about the wisdom of the current US National Missile Defense program.