

Israel is increasingly worried about the threat of a nuclear, missile-equipped Iran. So the Israeli military is working on "a high-fly­ing, long-endurance unmanned in­frared sensor" that can tell the difference between "nuclear war­heads amid doz­ens of decoys sent to confound na­tional missile defenses," Defense News' Barbara Opall-Rome reports. "If implemented, the Israeli program will mark the first use of an unmanned platform for [n]uclear warhead hunting."

A prototype of the long-range, high-resolution target-discrimination sensor has already been tested aboard a business jet under a closely held Israeli-German program called Bluebird... [D]etails about the demonstrator remain classified... “There’s nothing comparable. Air­borne versions have been used as research tools, but nothing has ever been integrated into an active na­tional defense sensor network ... Certainly, there’s never been any­thing like this mounted on a UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle],” an international industry consultant said. The U.S. military experimented with putting infrared sensors on a Boeing 767, an effort called the Air­borne Optical Adjunct. It was quietly killed in the 1990s as the Pentagon sought to move all its missile defense sensors to space.

Picking out a war­head from sophisticated decoys is "if not the most challenging, one of the most challenging problems that missile defense people are working," GlobalSecurity.org director John Pike tells* *Defense News. But it's not impossible.

*He point­ed to the U.S. Navy’s Cooperative Engagement Capability program, which overcame initial bugs and now allows Aegis cruisers to co­ordinate their radar tracks into an integrated picture of incoming missiles. *

[Photo: GD]

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