Berlin 2008 – scientific programme

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PV: Plenarvorträge

PV XIV

PV XIV: Special Talk

Friday, February 29, 2008, 13:15–14:00, H 0105

The US Missile Defense and Its European Components – Implications for European Security — •Theodore Postol — Science, Technology and Global Security Working Group, MIT, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Building E51-163, Cambridge, MA 02139

During 2007 the United States has been presenting briefings and other documents to the European allies that extensively describe the Bush Administration’s plans to deploy missile defenses aimed at defending Europe from postulated long-range ballistic missile attacks from Iran. The US plan proposes to deploy a large X-band radar called the EMR (European Midcourse Radar) in the Czech Republic, a launch site of 10 Ground-Based Interceptors, modified from 3-stages to 2, and a Forward Based X-Band Radar (FBX) at some as yet undisclosed location near Iran.

A serious scientific and technical assessment of the US plan leads to the conclusions that:

(1) The technology being used in the European missile defense will never be able to reliably tell the difference between warheads and decoys, which means that the system will have little or no defensive capability in any real combat environment.

(2) The United States has been systematically making false technical statements about the plan to its European allies and to Russia that have significant policy implications for European security.

(3) Using the Missile Defense Agency’s own questionable assumptions about system performance, it can be shown that there are alternative defense-configurations that would theoretically give better defense coverage of Europe and would be more robust and reliable relative to the currently proposed missile defense.

(4) Unlike the currently proposed US missile defense, these alternative defense-configurations would be unambiguously pointed at Iran, rather than Russia.

This talk will describe the scientific and technical facts that lead to the above conclusions