Missile Defense Fantasies: AKA That Above Top Secret Green Gas BeeDee Was Talm'bout....,

undark |  century now, governments and their military forces have enlisted the aid of scientists and engineers to invent weapons, devise defenses, and advise on their use and deployment.

Unfortunately, scientific and technological realities don’t always conform to the preferred policies of politicians and generals. Back in the 1950s, some U.S. officials liked to proclaim that scientists should be “on tap, not on top”: in other words, ready to provide handy advice when needed, but not offering advice that contradicted the official line. That attitude has persisted into the present, but scientists have steadfastly refused to play along.

One of the best-known leaders of this resistance is Theodore “Ted” Postol, professor emeritus of science, technology, and national security policy at MIT. Trained as a physicist and nuclear engineer, Postol has spent a career immersed in the details of military and defense technology. He worked for Congress in the now-defunct Office of Technology Assessment, then in the Pentagon as an adviser to the Chief of Naval Operations before joining academia, first at Stanford University and then returning to his alma mater, MIT.

Throughout, he has been an outspoken critic of unworkable concepts, impractical ideas, and failed technological fantasies, including Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” system, the vaunted Patriot missile of the first Gulf War, and more recent intercontinental ballistic missile defense concepts tested by the U.S. His investigations and analyses have repeatedly revealed self-deception, misrepresentation, flawed research, and outright fraud from the Pentagon, academic and private laboratories, and Congress.

When we contacted him, we found that, far from being retired at age 70, he was preparing to travel to Germany to consult with the German Foreign Ministry on European-Russian relations. His work exemplifies the eternal verity that if something sounds too good to be true, it usually is. In the exchange below, his responses have been edited for length and clarity.