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WASHINGTON (AFP) - A US plan for a national missile defense (NMD) to guard against attacks by so-called "rogue states" is short on science and should be shelved, US physicists warned.
Washington insists it needs NMD to protect itself from possible launches from North Korea, Iran, or Iraq. However, a group of scientists warned those nations could thwart the planned system with cheap and simple countermeasures.
Some 35 scientists went to the US Congress to "tell our politicians that the planned national missile defense (NMD) will not work," said Lisbeth Gronlund, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
One of the men in the group, retired missile engineer Roy Danchick, said the Pentagon's own data shows that easily obtainable countermeasures would defeat the NMD being discussed. Danchick warned against "a fatal rush to deploy a system that doesn't work."
"To proceed with this would be a tragic error," said Kurt Gottfried, an Emeritus Professor of Physics at Cornell University and the head of the Union of Concerned Scientists. "It may never be ready." President Bill Clinton is set to decide later this year whether to deploy the $60 billion system, which could be in place by 2005.
The Pentagon has planned another test next month after two previous trials, one in October in which the NMD worked, and another in January that saw the system miss its target. An MIT scientist critical of NMD has charged that tests were rigged to hide the system's inability to distinguish between a warhead and a simple decoy.
Any nation technologically able to launch a missile could defeat the planned NMD by multiplying the number of warheads to overwhelm the system, or placing them in Mylar balloons alongside empty balloons, the scientists warned.
One prominent NMD supporter, Republican Representative Curt Weldon, blasted criticisms as coming from the equivalent of "the Flat Earth Society" - know-nothings, unaware of technological advances that, he said, enable NMD to discern among countermeasures. "These scientists are clearly barking up the wrong tree," Weldon said in a statement issued while traveling with US Defense Secretary William Cohen in Russia.
Nuclear powers Russia and China strongly oppose the plan, and Russia has rejected US efforts to alter the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty to allow Washington's initiative to go forward.
Cohen arrived in Moscow this Monday to engage Russia head-on in a debate over rival US and Russian missile defense plans as both countries vied for support in Europe. President Vladimir Putin, who floated a surprise Russian proposal for a European missile defense system June 5 in Rome, was expected to meet Tuesday with Cohen, US officials said.
The Defense Secretary also will talk to Russian Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev and members of parliament. He was hosting a dinner late Monday for a group of Russian policy makers, thinkers on security policy, and chess master Gary Kasparov, officials said.
Flying to Washington from Stockholm, Cohen told reporters he would be seeking details about Russia's idea for a joint missile defense system that would protect Europe without violating the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty
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