"This so-called national missile defense system won't do the job," said Andrew Sessler, chairman of the committee comprising 10 other independent senior physicists and engineers that drew up the report.

"The United States should shelve its NMD plans and rethink its options for countering missile threats," Sessler said.

The report claimed that the defense system, which had been envisaged to be ready by 2005, would be defeated by "simple responses from new missile states."

The NMD system is intended to defend US territory from attacks by tens of intercontinental-range ballistic missiles armed with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.

However, biological or chemical weapons could be carried in the form of many small bomblets on the missile warhead and released early in flight, overwhelming the defense with too many targets.

Chair of the Union of Concerned Scientists, Kurt Gottfried, said: "Any long-range missile attack with biological weapons would surely be delivered by bomblets.

"The planned NMD system could not defend against such an attack."

US President Bill Clinton is scheduled to decide on deployment this fall, after a third intercept test in June and a Pentagon recommendation in July, in order to be ready with the system by 2005.

The first intercept test in October hit the decoy -- critics say it had some help -- and the second test, in January, was a miss.

Democrats in Congress and key Republicans have urged that the decision be put on hold until a new president takes office next year.

The report was researched by scientists from Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Security Studies Program, and the universities of Cornell, California at Los Angeles, Maryland and Pennsylvania universities.

The United States has so far been unsuccessful in its requests to Russia for changes to be made in the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that would allow the deployment of an initial phase of the system consisting of 100 interceptors based in Alaska and oriented toward east Asia.

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MILSPACE
German MP Warns Of New Arms Race
Washington (AFP) March 28, 2000 - The leader of Germany's delegation to the NATO parliamentary assembly warned Tuesday that US plans for a national missile defense system (NMD) will lead to a new international arms race.