Tiny Switch in Thousands of Missiles May Be Faulty

Faulty manufacture by a Baldwin Park company of a small electronic switch used in most of the air-launched tactical missiles in the U.S. arsenal has raised doubts about the reliability of thousands of missile warheads, Pentagon sources said Friday.

An official Navy spokesman said no problems with the “stator” switches made by Asher Engineering Corp. have shown up in extensive testing of both the parts and the missiles. The switches are critical parts of the warhead firing systems.

But other Pentagon officials said Asher’s admitted failure to verify that the devices met military specifications could force the military to take apart perhaps hundreds of missiles to determine the risks posed by the switches.

One Pentagon official familiar with the problem said Friday that the faulty switches may have played a role in some failures of the Air Force and Navy’s Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile (AMRAAM), the long-delayed high-technology missile scheduled to become those services’ primary air-to-air weapon beginning next year.

“This is a very critical little element you’re talking about here,” said the official, who declined to be identified. “Now the question is: Will they work or not? Has it been the cause of any failures or not? That’s going to be a tough one.”

The stator switch is a circular, 1- or 2-square-inch piece of electronic circuitry that completes an electrical connection in a missile warhead firing mechanism. Failure of the part, which costs $15 to $18, would be more likely to prevent the warhead from detonating, rather than cause it to detonate prematurely, the Pentagon expert said.

Continuing Investigation

Asher employees told agents of the Defense Criminal Investigative Service last week that they had falsely certified the switches as meeting military specifications at the order of their prime contractor, Micronics International of Brea, according to Bud Asher, president of the small Baldwin Park firm.

The questioning was part of a continuing criminal investigation of Micronics.

Asher’s quality assurance officials wrote the certifications “the way they (Micronics) required it without realizing that by writing it, they were not doing the right thing,” Asher said.

Asher said Micronics, under pressure from military program officers to meet price and time schedules, did not want to spend the time and money required to have the switches tested by an outside laboratory, as the military’s specifications required. The parts went into many of the fuzes manufactured by Micronics from about 1981 through last year, Asher said.

The Times reported in October that the Pentagon had launched a criminal investigation of Micronics. Investigators suspected that it was short cuts taken by the company in manufacturing safety and arming mechanisms, or “fuzes,” for the Phoenix air-to-air missile that had forced the Navy to mothball 500 missiles worth $425 million.

G. Addison Appleby, chairman and chief executive of Precision Aerotech, the La Jolla-based firm that owns Micronics, said Friday that Micronics officials never asked Asher Engineering to falsify manufacturing records. Rather, he said, Asher employees simply were asked to complete revised certification forms at a government inspector’s request.

Thousands of Missiles

Appleby blamed the ongoing investigation on false information spread by the government inspector, who has since been barred from Micronics’ plant.

“He came into our plant saying he had shut the last three plants he worked in down and that he would try to shut us down, too,” Appleby said.

Besides the AMRAAM, Pentagon sources said the suspect switches are in thousands of Phoenix, High-Speed Anti-Radar (HARM), Sparrow, and Sidewinder missiles--the bulk of the air-to-air missile arsenals of the Navy and Air Force.

The sources said the switches also are in Navy Standard surface-to-air missiles, Navy Harpoon surface-to-surface missiles and Air Force and Navy Maverick air-to-ground missiles. They also are used in the British Sky Flash air-to-air missile.

A Navy spokesman declined to confirm that Pentagon officials had been apprised of the evidence presented last week to the Defense Criminal Investigative Service. But whether or not the switches were properly manufactured and tested, he said, tests conducted at later stages of the fuzes’ and missiles’ production demonstrated that the missiles’ performance was unaffected.

“No technical problems have arisen with any of these missiles, nor have there been any known failures of stator switches,” the spokesman said.

Both the Phoenix and the AMRAAM, however, have had troubles throughout their development, not all of which have been fully explained. Los Angeles-based Hughes Aircraft, the prime contractor on the Phoenix, has shut down its Tucson, Ariz., production plant twice since 1984 to correct severe quality control problems.

The General Accounting Office charged in 1986 that the Air Force had been grossly unrealistic in forecasting the technical risks involved in building the AMRAAM, though the missile in the past has reported to have performed well in tests.

An Air Force spokesman in Washington said he would have no comment.

Appleby said Micronics, a 150-employee company, had lost $2.5 million in the last nine months in complying with government inspectors’ and investigators’ demands, going so far as to employ one quality-control inspector for every manufacturing worker.

“The Navy air people just finished a week-long audit of our facilities,” he said. “They gave us a glowing report. They said they had never seen a company turn around as quickly as this company had.”