>From physicist Robert Park's *excellent* "What's New" weekly newsletter,
archived at the American Physical Society page at: http://www.aps.org/WN
Brian
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1. MISSILE DEFENSE: WILL NORTH KOREA PUT BEACONS ON ITS MISSILES? Undersecretary of Defense Pete Aldridge assured the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday that a rudimentary missile defense in Ft. Greely Alaska would be 90 percent effective in stopping North Korean ballistic missiles. Senators were openly skeptical, and the ranking Democrat, Carl Levin (D-MI), suggested Aldridge go back and look at the numbers. The most notable success of the missile defense was to destroy the ABM Treaty (WN 14 Jun 02), but against ballistic missiles its success rate is only 62% and that was with homing beacons on the missiles. The Pentagon plans to go ahead and deploy 10 interceptors near Ft. Greely anyway. A 1983 law prohibits deployment of systems that have not been shown to work, but Secretary Rumsfeld argues that missile defense is so important we should deploy while we're testing (WN 28 Feb 03).
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