Israel Developing Nuke-Hunting Drone

By Noah Shachtman
November 07, 2008 | 2:15:23 PM
Categories: Drones, Missiles, Mullah Menace, Nukes, Sabras
Courtesy Of Wired Blog Network

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.

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