Jim Wilson writes for Popular Mechanics. Excerpt:
Lie detectors have never been popular. Criminals, obviously, don’t like them. The courts want nothing to do with them, and refuse to admit polygraph results as evidence. Police have mixed feelings–depending upon whether they are giving the test or taking it. Although the billion-dollar polygraph industry administers an estimated million or so tests a year, it has been steadily losing ground on the legal front. Over the last 10 years, laws have increasingly restricted the number of circumstances in which it can be used. Now comes the proverbial last straw that could make 2001 the year the polygraph died.
The turning point came this past summer. Scientists and engineers at the nation’s major weapons laboratories staged what amounts to a job action against congressionally mandated lie detector tests. “The majority of Sandia engineers and scientists who service nuclear weapons in the field have refused to take the test, and the Department of Energy is suddenly without authorized staff to deal with a nuclear weapons emergency,” says Dr. Alan P. Zelicoff, of Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M. Sandia is the largest of the three major DOE nuclear weapons laboratories. It is chiefly responsible for developing targeting, security and detonation systems for nuclear weapons. The explosive components are developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which is also in New Mexico, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Refusal to take a polygraph test can lead to the loss of a security clearance. However, a DOE spokesman says the agency has never been without the ability to field a Nuclear Emergency Search Team.
Scientists at all three labs have been grumbling about the test, but Zelicoff has been the most vocal opponent of polygraph screening. His criticisms carry considerable weight because of his position as a senior scientist at Sandia’s Center for National Security and Arms Control. When Congress wanted to know what the United States was doing to ensure compliance with arms-control treaties, Zelicoff was the man the DOE sent to answer its questions.
Zelicoff’s credentials for questioning polygraph tests are even more solid. In addition to being a physicist, he is a medical doctor. Proponents of polygraphs are, for the most part, psychologists. No one questions their credentials to deal with issues of the mind. But Zelicoff has turned the tables by maintaining that the limitations of polygraph exams are rooted in human physiology.
“Every first-year medical student knows that the four parameters measured during a polygraph—blood pressure, pulse, sweat production and breathing rate—are affected by an unaccountable myriad of emotions,” Zelicoff explains. “But there is not one chapter, not one, in any medical text that associates these quantities in any way with an individual’s intent to deceive.”