As a "Working Paper" issued recently under the auspices of the Union of Concerned Scientists noted, America's ground-based midcourse program has not been subjected to real-world tests. Five hit-to-kill tests have resulted in three hits. But each test: (1) used identical test geometrics (the location of launches, trajectories of target and interceptor missiles); (2) released the same objects (payload bus, warhead and decoy); (3) occurred at the same time of day; (4) made the lone decoy obviously and consistently different from the warhead; (5) told the defense system what to look for in advance; (6) attempted intercept at an unrealistically low closing speed; (7) kept the target cluster sufficiently compact to aid the kill vehicle's field of view; and (8) provided the kill vehicle with unduly accurate artificial tracking data.

Any ground-based midcourse missile defense system has to contend with virtually insurmountable countermeasures, especially the decoys that, in space, are quite indistinguishable from the warheads. Yet the three successful hits did not have to contend with even the countermeasures that a missile from a "rogue" regime would probably employ.

A National Intelligence Estimate in 1999 determined that "countermeasures would be available to emerging missile states." In April 2000 a "Countermeasures" study group from the Union of Concerned Scientists and the MIT Security Studies Program concluded: "Even the full [National Missile Defense] system would not be effective against an attacker using countermeasures, and an attacker could deploy such countermeasures before even the first phase of the NMD system was operational." Consequently, "it makes no sense to begin deployment."

Craig Eisendrath, Melvin Goodman and Gerald Marsh (Eisendrath and Goodman are senior fellows with the Center for International Policy in Washington; Marsh is a physicist at Argonne National Laboratory) state the problem even more starkly in their recent book The Phantom Defense: America's Pursuit of the Star Wars Illusion: "This is the bottom line: the problem isn't technology, it's physics. Decoys and warheads can always be made to emit almost identical signals in the visible, infrared, and radar bands; their signatures can be made virtually the same."

If such information troubles Defense Department officials responsible for missile defense, they seldom admit it publicly. However, they're not nearly as irresponsible as the political and "scholarly" cheerleaders who remain unmoved by a half-century of failure and the physics of countermeasures. I encountered one of them last June at a missile defense conference in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania.

Representative Weldon delivered the conference's keynote address to more than 220 participants from the Defense Department, the military industry, think tanks, various universities and the press. Weldon is the author of HR 4, legislation that made it "the policy of the United States to deploy a national missile defense." (Senator Carl Levin was able to add amendments to the Senate bill on missile defense that made the program dependent upon the annual budget process and tied it to retention of the ABM treaty; Weldon referred to the amendments as cowardice. Nevertheless, they remained in the Missile Defense Act that President Clinton signed on July 22, 1999.)

Weldon told the audience that the United States requires a missile-defense system to protect its citizens from an intentional missile attack by a "rogue" regime presumably undeterred by the prospect of an overwhelming American nuclear retaliation. He even displayed an accelerometer and a gyroscope, Russian missile components allegedly bound for a "rogue." He then displayed an enlarged, poster-size photograph of Russia's SS-25 ICBM. Russia possesses more than 400 such missiles, he asserted, and any one of them might be launched accidentally against the United States, given Russia's deteriorating command and control capabilities.

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