Theodore Postol
American physicist
Theodore A. Postol (born 30 April 1946) is a professor emeritus of Science, Technology, and International Security at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Prior to his work at MIT, he worked at Argonne National Laboratory, the Pentagon, and Stanford University. He was on the editorial board of the journal Science & Global Security until 2019. Postol is also a prominent critic of U.S. missile defense systems, challenging the technical efficacy of military technologies through independent analysis. Some of this analysis has been criticized by colleagues for errors, flaws in methodology, and factual inaccuracies. According to The Daily Telegraph in 2023, Postol has spent much of his career "trying to make sure that the U.S. doesn't build ballistic missile defences".
Postol rose to national prominence in the early 1990s when he challenged U.S. Army claims regarding the success rate of the MIM-104 Patriot missile during the first Gulf War. While the government initially claimed a near-perfect interception rate, Postol’s analysis—later supported by a House Government Operations Committee investigation—concluded that the actual success rate was likely below 10%. For his work in disclosing misinformation regarding national missile defense, Postol has received numerous honors, including the Leo Szilard Prize (1990) and the Norbert Wiener Award (2001). In recent years, however, Postol’s work has been the subject of significant debate.
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This entry incorporates text from “Theodore Postol” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.