2 sentenced in case tied to India's nuclear missiles

Ending a national security case stretching back to 1988, two New England defense company executives have been sentenced to one year of home detention and three years' probation for illegally selling India technology that made its nuclear missiles more accurate.

A decade after a jury returned guilty verdicts, a federal judge sentenced Walter L. Lachman, 72, of Concord, and Maurice H. Subilia Jr., 58, of Kennebunkport, Maine. In addition to home detention and probation, Subilia will have to serve six months in a halfway house for committing perjury. Both men were also fined $250,000, as was Fiber Materials Inc., the Biddeford, Maine, firm they ran.

The case traces back to April 1988, when Lachman, chief executive of Fiber Materials, and Subilia, president of the company, conspired to export a control panel made by their firm to the Defense Research Development Laboratory in India. India, already a declared nuclear power, was working on ballistic missiles that could carry nuclear warheads, according to federal prosecutors.

Critical to the missiles was a material called carbon-carbon, used on missile nosetips, rocket nozzles, and reentry heatshields to help maneuver through the ultra-hot and turbulent atmosphere. The control panel from Fiber Materials would help operate a production-sized isostatic press used to produce carbon-carbon.

At the time, a special export license from the federal government was required to sell such equipment to India. Lachman and Subilia did not obtain the license, according to federal prosecutors. Federal officials sought to control such sales out of fear that a bolstered Indian nuclear offensive program could destabilize Asia.

In 1991 and 1992, Subilia and Fiber Materials sent employees to India to help install and use the control panel to run the carbon-carbon making process. In fact, the Indian government has since publicly boasted about use of carbon-carbon shields as an advance in its missile program.

The men and their firm were convicted in March 1995. They filed motions to throw out the conviction, and US District Judge Douglas P. Woodlock took eight years to rule. In 2003, he dismissed the convictions on the grounds that the federal export rules were unconstitutionally vague, while still calling the defendants' actions ''fundamentally reprehensible." The charges were reinstated by a federal appeals court.

Last Friday, after a hearing, Woodlock handed down the sentences, taking into consideration, he said, the length of the delay.