Volume 121 >> Issue 30 : Wednesday, August 8, 2001

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Postol Criticizes Missile Plan

Postol: The current system, which is hardware that we can talk about, is perhaps the most vulnerable of all missile defenses I’ve looked at in my career. Basically, it’s a missile defense that has no chance of working. First of all, it operates at a very high altitude in the near-vacuum of space, and at these altitudes there is essentially no air drag to cause a light object to blow up relative to a heavy one. So a feather and a rock travel along together. This means that building a decoy that could travel along with the warhead is a nearly trivial task. There are some details that matter: you want it to heat and cool with the sun like the shell of the warhead, but these are things that any intelligent MIT undergrad could figure out. [laughs] In fact, I’m sure if the intelligent undergrads at MIT were involved, there would be much more effective countermeasures than these guys are now considering as realistic. But basically, because you’re operating in the near-vacuum of space, you have this extremely large vulnerability due to the fact that there’s no air drag that your adversary has to contend with when they deploy countermeasures. So an inflated balloon in the shape of a warhead looks like a warhead. A traffic cone off the street looks like a warhead. A balloon with a stripe on it can look like a warhead. You can’t see the shape of the object, so when the balloon slowly tumbles, and the stripe comes into view and disappears, its brightness will change much like an object that was maybe precessing in front of you. So you can virtually simulate or emulate all the signals that you could possibly exploit for telling the warheads from the decoys with the simplest of objects.

Now what the missile defense advocates would like you to believe is that we have some adversary, say North Korea. Let’s just do a little logic here. Advocates of this missile defense system are claiming there’s some adversary out there who’s got the vast industrial and scientific base needed to build an intercontinental-ranged ballistic missile, the independently-vast scientific base to build nuclear warheads -- because that’s a different industrial and scientific activity -- and the ability to build the heat shields to put the warhead in so it can survive re-entry, but they can’t figure out how to deploy a balloon along with this warhead. That’s what they want you to believe, and if you believe that, I’ve got this bridge out here I want to sell you. [laughs] So basically there are really extraordinary leaps of faith required to believe that this current system has any chance of working, and I don’t think it’s in the American interest to build a weapons system of this scale that has no chance of working. In fact, it could provoke responses on the part of potential adversaries that would eventually leave us in a much less secure situation, because if people respond due to concerns about what this system might do or might become at a later time, then what you’re going to have is a responding enemy while you have no capability to offset this response. So in the end you’re worse off. It’s sort of like waving a plastic gun in front of a frightened person with an AK-47. It’s just not very smart. So the system has really no capability. I think it’s just a bad idea to build weapons systems that don’t have a chance of working and then basically misinform your population in telling them they’re protected. I think there’s a moral question here that really gets to the heart of what science and engineering ethics are about. For example, if you’re an engineer and you know a bridge could fall down while people are on it, and you just tell them, “Go ahead, it’s safe, don’t worry,” that would be an unethical act. And to willfully and knowingly look at a weapons system that’s supposed to protect American citizens and know it’s not going to work but tell people otherwise is no less immoral than telling people that that bridge is okay. I think there are very far-ranging issues here.

The Tech: How have you dealt with your recent brushes with the Pentagon, personally and professionally?

Postol: On five occasions, I’ve written analyses based on lawfully-derived unclassified sources that the government has claimed are secret. So this is the fifth time it’s happened to me now, and you kind of get used to it.

The Tech: What is different now?

Postol: In the last two weeks, it appears that the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, in combination with the DSS, has gone to the MIT administration and claimed, I believe illegally, that MIT has a responsibility to come to my office and collect the documents they claim are secret, that you can get off a Web site in Russia, and basically conduct an investigation into my security violations for having sent a letter to the General Accounting Office in mid-April that was further outlining details of the MIT Lincoln Laboratory fraudulent document. So the only thing in this letter was basically an analysis of a piece of that document that was already circulating all over the world. It appears the only reason they’re concerned is that I’m talking and I have the ability to analyze this fraudulent document and point to additional details of why it’s fraudulent. They implied that MIT was obligated to come after a faculty member because MIT has a contract to operate Lincoln Laboratory. Now this is a very bizarre argument. It would be like going to the president of Harvard and saying, “You have defense contracts on laboratories associated with Harvard, so you’re obligated to go after this member of the MIT faculty.” Lincoln Laboratory has no relationship with me that’s formal. My [security] clearances are not held by Lincoln Laboratory. My clearances are not held by MIT. MIT has no relationship to my clearances, and it’s none of their business as far as any legal obligation due to my lawfully-derived analysis, except to defend me as a member of the faculty, since this research was done as a member of the MIT faculty, using documents that are available all over the world. My position has been that nobody from MIT, as was initially suggested, is going to come into my office and collect any documents, and nobody from MIT is going to conduct any investigation of me. This is off-limits, not for discussion, not for consideration. This was initially a position that President Vest seemed to think might make sense. I made it very clear to him that it made no sense, that it’s not acceptable, and that, in fact, even the suggestion of this in my view was quite improper and should never have even crossed his mind. However, we had a meeting with a bunch of senior faculty and senior researchers at the Center here with President Vest this Thursday, and although he was fairly non-committal in how he was going to deal with the situation, it appeared that he was backing away from any intention to try to collect anything or having MIT operate as an agent of the U.S. government. So right now I would say things are still unresolved but appear to be moving in a more constructive direction. It remains to be seen how effectively the MIT administration deals with this. There seems to me to be no choice at all on the part of the administration. They have to repel this attack on academic freedom and free speech at a university. I do think that this is an indication of some of the unhealthy influences that are continuing to impinge on the university environment. I think MIT is a place where there are lots of issues of this kind that need to be aired.

The Tech: So Vest’s initial reaction has changed?

Postol: Well he suggested in a letter to me that what he would want to do was to work on my behalf, quietly, in Washington -- something I can do without, quite frankly -- while he initially complied with the Department of Defense’s requests. I told him, “No way that’s going to happen.” My past experience with the MIT administration has not been good. If you students get caught cheating, you get in trouble, but when a faculty member gets caught engaged in fraudulent behavior, as occurred a few years ago, the MIT administration covers up and praises. Mr. Vest and I discussed this last Thursday as a main reason why I don’t trust the administration to behave in an ethical way in these matters. If I were a student at MIT, and if I saw this kind of behavior on the part of the administration, I can tell you I would be appalled, given the expectation that was stated for my conduct. There’s an interesting double standard here and I, for one, don’t accept it.

The Tech: So what’s your outlook on the future of your own research?

Postol: My research is going to go on unimpeded, and it’s going to continue along the direction it was going when this happened. I’m going to continue to talk about my findings, I’m not going to modify my behavior in any way, I’m going to continue complying with the law, and I’m going to expect other people to comply with the law, including the Department of Defense and the MIT Administration.

The Tech: So from your point of view, what does MIT need to do?

Postol: Two things I’d like to see happen--and now I’m focusing on the MIT administration--is that the next time a faculty member gets attacked this way, they should not get a phone call--as I did--from a lawyer hired by MIT telling them that he works for MIT and not for me, and that somehow the interests of the MIT administration are different from the interests of the faculty when it comes to free speech issues. That’s unacceptable, and I think it’s important for the MIT administration to have a clear and unambiguous policy that any member of the faculty or researcher who gets attacked in this way, by either governmental or corporate interests, will be defended as long as there isn’t an issue of criminality. If you engage in research and analysis that’s lawfully-pursued then any attempt to intimidate the student, researcher, or faculty member engaged in these activities will be met and should be met with the full force of the legal mechanisms available to MIT. Mr. Vest should not be MIT; the faculty, the students, and the researchers should be MIT. There should be no distinguishing between the two.

The Tech: And the second point?

Postol: The document that is alleged to be secret, which again is available all over the world, is a document that is a scientific fraud put together by people at MIT Lincoln Laboratory and being described to members of Congress as an MIT study that shows that warhead from decoy discrimination can be done reliably. MIT’s name should not be used in this manner when we know it’s happening. I have written President Vest about this multiple times, and there’s no clear position on that issue as well at this point. You can’t do it as a student, the MIT Lincoln Laboratory shouldn’t be allowed to do it, and MIT faculty shouldn’t be allowed to engage in scientific fraud. So the whole institution is damaged when this kind of thing is allowed. I can’t understand why we talk about ethics to the students when we can’t seem to follow ethics on an important debate that is related to fundamental security issues for this country, where a scientific fraud is being perpetrated under MIT’s name. There needs to be a real investigation, not one staffed with people who are going to give the right answer but with people who have scientific credentials, and the findings need to be reviewed by the tenured members of the faculty for their scientific integrity. It should not have taken all this publicity to deal with this. In each letter to President Vest, I intentionally said ‘this will become public, and you should be dealing with this now before it becomes public.’ Now it’s public, and I’m going to continue talking about it.