The APS Report Weathers Its Critics

It comes as no great surprise that groups promoting the president’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) have attempted to discredit the recently published American Physical Society study Science and Technology of Directed Energy Weapons (THE SCIENTIST, May 18, 1987, p. 11). The APS study, released on April 23, 1987, addressed the scientific feasibility of a ballistic missile defense utilizing high-intensity lasers and energetic particle beams as weapons. A panel of experts on directed energy technologies concluded, after a detailed 18-month study, that the required performance levels were far beyond the capabilities of existing technologies. They estimated that at least a decade of research would be required just to decide whether such weapons would ever be feasible. The only technical challenge to the APS report came from two SDI scientists—Lowell Wood of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and Gregory Canavan of Los Alamos National Laboratory, who had access to the report in the seven months during which it was screened from the American people by the national security review process. In an item-by-item rebuttal, the APS study panel demonstrated that Wood and Canavan based their criticisms on erroneous physics coupled with groundless assumptions over the performance of unproven technologies. The study panel acknowledged a clerical oversight, made in accommodating changes required by the SDI organization on national security grounds, and a textual ambiguity that apparently misled Wood and Canavan in one instance. Otherwise, the errors claimed by Wood and Canavan supply do not exist. Before the report was released, the panel received comments from appropriate SDIO officials, and the report was modified to reflect their suggestions. Throughout the process, technical critiques on various sections of the report were solicited and received from government laboratories and SDIO contractors. SDIO officials have agreed that the numbers in the APS report are subatantially correct. The comments by Frederick Seitz,ex cerpted in THE SCIENTIST (July 13, 1987, p. 13) were based on the arguments of Wood and Canavan. They were not, as THE SCIENTIST indicated, made in testimony before a House committee, but rather before a coalition of Republican congressmen who support SDI. Seitz is identified in THE SCIENTIST only as president emeritus of Rockefel- ler University. That is much too modest. Frederick Seitz is a distinguished physicist who served 30 years ago as president of the American Physical Society and as president of the National Academy of Sciences. Currently, he serves as chairman of the board of the George C. Marshall Institute and chairman of the Science and Engineering Committee for a Secure World, and is associated with the Center for Peace and Freedom—all organizations that exist to promote SDI. He has also in recent years served the International Conference for the Unity of Sciences, an organization affiliated with the Unification Church. The ubiquitous Seitz is also the chairman of the SDI Advisory Committee of the Department of Defense. That group has been urging the creation of a Strategic Defense Initiative Institute to provide SDIO with technical advice. The proposed institute would be a federally funded R&D center along the lines of the Rand Corp., Lincoln Labs, and the Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos national laboratories. DOD proposes to issue a sole-source contract to manage this institute to a group that includes— Frederick Seitz. Even as some SDI supporters were attacking the conclusions of the American Physical Society report, it seems that a secret DOD report was making many of the same points. According to recent stories in The Washington Post (July 10, 1987, p. A21), the report of a Defense Science Board panel concluded that as a consequence of the current gaps in system design and key technologies, there is no way of confidently assessing system performance, cost or schedule. It could almost have been taken from the APS report. Park is executive director for public affairs of the American Physical Society, 2000 Florida Ave., N. W, Washington, DC 20009.

The APS Report Weathers Its Critics

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