Friday, 24 April 1987 Washington, DC
1.
IN "THE SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY OF DIRECTED ENERGY WEAPONS,"
the APS Study Group concludes that the development of an effective
ballistic missile defense utilizing directed energy weapons (DEW)
would require performance levels that vastly exceed current
capabilities. The report, released yesterday, has received
extensive media coverage. Additionally, the report concludes that
insufficient information exists to decide whether the required
performance levels can ever be achieved. The Study Group
estimates that ". . .even in the best of circumstances, a decade
or more of intensive research would be required just to provide
the technical knowledge needed for an informed decision about the
potential effectiveness and survivability of directed energy
weapon systems." This would still have to be followed by
extensive development in many important technological areas. The
Soviet Union can be expected to use the time to make their
missiles less vulnerable to such weapons and to develop the means
to attack the defensive system. The report cautions against
forcing an immature technology into an engineering evaluation.
This would tend to freeze the technology at levels inadequate for
its ultimate goals and absorb resources that could otherwise be
used for research on more promising approaches. In recommending
the approval of the report to the APS Council, the Review
Committee, headed by George Pake of Xerox, acknowledged that the
security review resulted in "small but significant deletions from
the report. In particular, some of the counter measures available
to the offense could not be discussed in detail." In addition to
the extensive media coverage, the report has already become a part
of the congressional debate over Star Wars, with a speech
delivered this morning by Senator Proxmire (D-WI). The Executive
Summary and Major Conclusions of the Study will be published in
the May issue of Physics Today. The full report will appear in
Reviews of Modern Physics.
2
. THE STRATEGIC DEFENSE INITIATIVE ORGANIZATION (SDIO),
in a
prepared statement, expressed pleasure that the APS has responded
to the President's challenge to the scientists and engineers of
the United States to join together to seek defensive solutions to
the ballistic missile threat. "Although the chapters in the
report...represent an objective independent appraisal of various
technologies, we find the conclusions to be subjective and unduly
pessimistic....The report has the additional problem of being a
snapshot in time that dates to the preparation of the report."
This is a pretty cheeky reaction to a report that SDIO bottled up
for nearly seven months. Members of the Study Panel, however,
expressed confidence that progress made since the study was
conducted does not invalidate any conclusions of the report. The
SDIO statement goes on to say that, "while the APS Study Group has
achieved an impressive compilation of unclassified source material
and, as one would expect, astutely applied physical principles and
their analysis, we would not have made several of the assumptions
they made in defining the technical requirements."
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