Missile Fraud

In his book, "Weapons and Hope," Freeman Dyson maintained: first, that strategic missile defense was impossible to achieve, and second, that high-level fraud would be the inevitable result of trying to achieve the impossible. The pressures to lie would be too great for anyone to resist.

Here is an interesting story:

A senior Congressional investigator has accused his agency of covering up a scientific fraud among builders of a $26 billion system meant to shield the nation from nuclear attack. The disputed weapon is the centerpiece of the Bush administration's antimissile plan, which is expected to cost more than $250 billion over the next two decades.

The investigator, Subrata Ghoshroy of the Government Accountability Office, led technical analyses of a prototype warhead for the antimissile weapon in an 18-month study.... Mr. Ghoshroy now says his agency ignored evidence that the two main contractors had doctored data, skewed test results and made false statements in a 2002 report that credited the contractors with revealing the warhead's failings to the government.

The agency strongly denied his accusations, insisting that its antimissile report was impartial and that it was right to exonerate the contractors of a coverup.

The dispute is unusual. Rarely in the 85-year history of the G.A.O., an investigative arm of Congress with a reputation for nonpartisan accuracy, has a dissenter emerged publicly from its ranks.

And Mr. Ghoshroy's assertions raise new questions about the Boeing Company's military arm, the main contractor for the troubled $26 billion system of interceptor rockets now being installed in Alaska and California. The system's "kill vehicles" are to zoom into space and destroy enemy warheads by force of impact.

But years of test failures have thrown the program into disarray, and the military has recently begun to look for a kill vehicle of greater reliability.

...The dispute over its reliability began a decade ago. Nira Schwartz, a senior engineer in 1995 and 1996 at the military contractor TRW, told her superiors that the company had falsified research findings meant to help kill vehicles differentiate incoming warheads from clouds of decoys.

...Finally, the team learned of a meeting in late August 1997 at which contractor personnel had reportedly made complete oral disclosures. But no contractor or federal official could recall anything specific about this meeting — no date, place, agenda or list of attendees.

Mr. Ghoshroy came to believe that the meeting had never happened, he said. Even so, the G.A.O. report incorporated its claims. The report also noted the explanations that the contractors gave for excluding some experimental data.

...Today, the military calls the dispute irrelevant to national defense because the Boeing kill vehicle was rejected in favor of one made by Raytheon. The Raytheon model now tips the nation's antimissile interceptors.

But Mr. Ghoshroy says the issue matters greatly. Boeing may have lost the kill vehicle competition, but it won a bigger contest as the Pentagon in 1998 named it lead contractor for the whole antimissile project. Charges of corporate dishonesty, he said, threaten to undermine the program's overall credibility.

...For his part, Mr. Ghoshroy said he found it "totally amazing" that the G.A.O. refused to admit that its report misinformed Congress and the public. "I'm concerned," he said, "that there's no one out there to oversee the overseer."