Debate Over Missile Defense

Physicists Marvin Goldberger and Herbert York offered disingenuous and specious arguments against a national missile defense (NMD) deployment (Commentary, June 2). They state that the tests have shown poor performance. In fact, tests show that most of the technology does work, including the capability of the sensor to discriminate the threat from a decoy and its ability to home in correctly for the kill (despite minor errors from the radar).

They criticize the tests as unrealistic because they are not performed in a wartime environment. In fact, no military hardware is procured without testing first under controlled conditions. The whole point to testing is to identify and fix errors in design and manufacture.

They suggest countermeasures could defeat the system. This is theoretically true of any defense system. Still, we deploy the best possible military hardware to discourage attacks against us. The Union of Concerned Scientists report that is the basis of their argument does not describe how any real adversary could technically implement such concepts in its offensive missiles. It merely shows that the physics allows for such countermeasures.

On the points of bomblets or smuggled weapons, there are other approaches to those problems. NMD is not proposed as the answer to every threat against us from abroad.

BERNARD ROTH, Physicist

Santa Barbara

* Goldberger and York are right on target, which you can’t say of the missile defense system. President Eisenhower was also right on target when he warned us about the power of the military-industrial complex, which gets more complex as time goes on. It still pours money into politicians’ coffers to persuade them to pull the wool over our eyes.

It should be evident to everyone that the authors are absolutely correct when they state that it is far more likely that weapons of destruction will be delivered by other means and the money spent on missile defense would be completely wasted.

HOWARD NIEDERMAN

San Clemente