Hitting the Broad side of nuclear missiles

William Broad appears to have based his most recent hatchet job on the ‘bullet-hits-bullet’ National Missile Defense system – entitled “Achilles’ Heel in Missile Plan: Crude Weapons” – on information provided him by various unnamed “federal and private experts” and “Pentagon anti-missile scientists.”

Broad does quote three ABM “experts” by name, but if the qualifications of Broad’s unnamed experts are no better than those named, then the New York Times probably ought to disavow the article.

The theme of the Broad hatchet job is that the recent test – wherein our outgoing speeding bullet really did find and hit an incoming speeding bullet – would have been a failure if the incoming bullet had been tumbling, end over end. According to Broad’s experts, the hitting-a-tumbling-bullet problem is so difficult that it threatens to defeat any foreseeable anti-missile weapon.

Who are the named experts, and what are their credentials?

First, there’s Jerry W. Cavender, who Broad twice claims was “the Army’s program manager for National Missile Defense” back in 1994.

Back then, in the wake of the Iraqi Scud attacks on Israel during the Gulf War, the Army was frantically upgrading the Patriot air-defense system with “advanced capabilities” – PAC-2 and PAC-3 – so as to field some kind of theater anti-ballistic missile defense (TMD) against Scuds. Just this week the Israelis successfully tested their Arrow TMD system, which is similar to the PAC-3, and was jointly developed by the United States and Israel.

As Broad has it, back then, the Army’s “highest priority” TMD threat included “primitive” attacks with tumbling warheads. By “primitive,” he apparently means the kinds of nuclear warheads that North Korea or Iran would likely have atop their ballistic missiles.

Our sophisticated nuke re-entry vehicles are small, very pointy cones, and re-enter the atmosphere pointy-end first. Primitive nuke re-entry vehicles are likely to look more like the capsule John Glenn made famous, which went up pointy-end first, but came back down blunt-end first, because the ablative heat shield was on the bottom.

Now, if a warhead is going to tumble, it will do so in outer space. But a TMD either attacks the ballistic missile in the atmosphere on the way up, or the re-entry vehicle as it re-enters the atmosphere on the way down. What the warhead does in outer space is of no consequence. In any case, the Scud warhead stays attached to the missile throughout its ballistic trajectory, and doesn’t tumble.

The Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO) was established in 1993, but the Joint Program Office for National Missile Defense (NMD) was not established until 1997, whereupon a number of Army entities at Huntsville, Alabama were either incorporated into the Joint Program Office, or became closely associated with it, including the Army’s Patriot Program Manager, the Space and Strategic Defense Command and the Huntsville Center of the Army’s Corps of Engineers.

If the Army had a program manager for BMD in 1994, he would necessarily have been a two- or three-star general on active duty, not a civilian. Now, there was a civilian engineer named Jerry W. Cavender working at Huntsville in those days, and apparently he is Broad’s chief expert on the importance of tumbling.

But Broad cites two other experts, Dr. Ted Postol and Dr. Nira Schwartz.

According to Broad, “Dr. Nira Schwartz, a senior engineer in 1995 and 1996 at TRW, a military contractor, was asked to do computer simulations in which a kill vehicle was tested against 200 types of enemy decoys and warheads, including tumblers. The kill vehicle always failed to distinguish between tumbling warheads and decoys, Dr. Schwartz said in an interview.”

What Broad knew, but didn’t tell you, was that Schwartz only worked for TRW for six months, and only worked on the kill-vehicle simulation project for a grand total of 40 hours – one work week – before she was fired. Upon being fired, she promptly filed a False Claims Act whistleblower suit against TRW. Schwartz alleged that TRW “knowingly and falsely certified” as being effective, discrimination technology that was “incapable of performing its intended purpose.”

At the time, TRW was a key subcontractor on a National Missile Defense program being managed by Boeing. TRW was responsible for the command-and-control system that received and processed target information, passing it on to missile interceptors carrying Raytheon hit-to-kill warheads.

Enter the other Broad expert witness, Ted – “Tumbling is a terribly big deal” – Postal. Who is Dr. Theodore A. Postol?

Well, he’s the guy who joined forces back in 1997 with fired TRW employee Schwartz to charge that TRW had committed fraud against the federal government. The FBI issued a final report on its investigation of the Schwartz-Postal charges on February 26, 2001:

Schwartz had filed a Qui Tam action in the Western District of California alleging wrongful termination and false claims on the part of TRW. Dr. Schwartz’s allegations were scientific in nature and concerned false claims made by TRW regarding the data obtained from the first test flight, IFT-1A. Postol expanded Schwartz’s allegations to include criminal conduct. Investigation revealed that Postol’s claim that data had been altered was unfounded.

As to Postol’s claim that the system is incapable of distinguishing between warheads and decoys, there is a dispute among scientists about the ability of the system to discriminate based on scientific grounds. This is a scientific dispute and Postol’s attempt to raise it to the level of criminal conduct had no basis in fact.

A Department of Justice civil attorney and an Assistant United States Attorney in the Central District of California, both advised that during the Qui Tam investigation, there was no indication of fraud or criminal activity.

The joint FBI-DCIS investigation failed to disclose evidence that a federal violation has been committed.

Since all logical investigation has been completed, this matter is being closed.

So, now that you know a few things you didn’t know before about Broad’s experts on tumbling, maybe you want to go back and read his article again. Or, maybe, you don’t.