Doty, Paul. "Can Investigations Improve Scientific Advice? The Case of the ABM". Minerva, Vol.10, No.2 (1972): 280-294.

Doty, Paul. "Can Investigations Improve Scientific Advice? The Case of the ABM". Minerva, Vol.10, No.2 (1972): 280-294.

• The debate within the scientific community over anti-ballistic missile systems is influenced by political pressures on various experts due to the Nixon administration's advocacy of the program (282).
• In these situations, the selection of scientific experts is itself a political act and their testimony, as well as the experts selected, are done so on the basis of supporting a specific position on the political issues (289).
• The author believes that instituted legal proceedings would consume to much time and energy and proposes that scientific experts be required to abstain from other political associations and contacts during their time advising the government, in order to make sure that they are only doing so as scientific experts, not as partisans on the issue (290). The author also proposes having all matters of concern be handled by the National Academy of Sciences (290-291).
• The Army was put in charge of missile defense in 1959, and they developed a number of systems despite objection to the program by members of civilian government and technical experts. The issue came to a head in January 1967, when a collection of military scientists unanimously advised President Johnson that anti-ballistic missile systems would be unable to stop a Soviet missile attack (282-283).
• Despite this unanimous statement by the scientific community, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara approved a national anti-ballistic missile system, called Sentinel, in September 1967 to defend against a possible Chinese attack. Public opposition to the system, supported by scientists and galvanized by the acquisition of bases in the Boston and Chicago areas, forced the Nixon administration to abandon the Sentinel program in 1969 and replace it with the Safeguard system of using Minuteman missiles to defend US Air Force bases (283).
• Debates around anti-ballistic missile defense systems in the US focused around issues of the required capacity of these systems, the areas and situations in which they should be deployed, the available technology, the cost-value ratio of these systems, and the need to have missile defense at all under MAD (283-284).
• Scientists who supported building anti-ballistic missile systems focused on the need for missile defense, whereas scientists who opposed missile defense focused on whether current technology allowed for the construction of systems adequate for the task. This is reflected in a very limited discussion of the other side's favored issues (284-285).
• During the Senate review of the proposed Sentinel program, the effectiveness of the system was tested based on strange criteria and held to an impossibly high bar of effectiveness and accuracy. Moreover, Senators and the scientific opposition seemed more interested in declaring the faults of the Sentinel system in certain circumstances than discussing its actual appreciations (285-287).
• The decision to implement the Sentinel system is ultimately a political decision and is determined by technical factors only if it is found that the system is not needed to counter existing Soviet threats or if it is unable to fulfill its role (291).
• The Soviet Union was initially a major supporter of anti-ballistic missile technology on the basis that it was purely defensive and would not destabilize the American-Soviet strategic balance. This opinion began to shift around the mid-1960s and by 1968, the Soviet leadership was ready to discuss limitations on anti-ballistic missile systems (291-292).
• Operational research is effectively impossible because there have never been real battlefield conditions for nuclear war. The research currently used claims high levels of accuracy, but its techniques are fundamentally different due to limitations on observation. All this data should be treated with caution (293).