Ted Postol

Theodore A. Postol is an American physicist and Professor Emeritus of Science, Technology and International Security at MIT, where he took both his physics degree and his doctorate in nuclear engineering. He worked as a staff scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, analysed MX missile basing for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, and served as scientific adviser to the Chief of Naval Operations at the Pentagon. He is best known for the technical analysis that dismantled the official account of Patriot performance in the 1991 Gulf War, and he has spent three decades testing missile-defence claims against physics. He holds the American Physical Society’s Leo Szilard Prize (1990), the AAAS Hilliard Roderick Prize (1995) and the Federation of American Scientists’ Richard L. Garwin Award (2016).