April 5, 2012 | Quote

Will Drones Go Nuclear?

Bill Roggio, editor of The Long War Journal, agrees that at this stage, nuclear-powered drones are very much just an idea, and a potentially flawed one at that.

“I don’t think you could keep a drone up for months at a time,” he told me. “I don’t think we’re at that level of maintenance and equipment. The engine might be able to withstand months of flying with the fuel, and that’s great. But there are other systems on an aircraft that require maintenance. So I would say it’s overly optimistic to say that a drone could stay in the air for months. I’d say days would be more likely.”

But he added that even setting this aside, “Planes do crash, drones do go down. So what happens when you have a nuclear power plant on an aircraft that crashes in enemy territory? The technology could fall into enemy hands or nuclear materials could end up with them.” …

“One of the reasons we like to use them, aside from longer loiter times, especially in places like Pakistan, is because of the question of what happens if one crashes and it’s manned?” Roggio says. “Because then you have all the implications of a pilot falling into enemy hands and then a search and rescue operation.”

And he argues that although drones have been much criticized for the political toll they have taken on ties between the U.S. and countries like Pakistan over the number of civilian deaths, that it’s the policy and not the technology that’s the real problem.

“It appears in Pakistan that we are doing this against the wishes of Muslim governments, and that’s a PR nightmare…The problems are with how the program is being communicated.”

“Odds are that if we didn’t fly drones then we’d probably come up with another solution. Maybe they’d be cruise missiles, or maybe we’d fly B-52s up to the border and launch longer range air-to-ground missiles. That wouldn’t fix the surveillance problem, but we’d find other ways. To me, it’s more the policies rather than the technology that drives these problems,” Roggio says.

Read the full article here.

Issues:

Al Qaeda Pakistan