June 14, 2005 :: USA Today :: Analysis
Recent newspaper stories have sparked a flurry of warnings that United States efforts to protect its assets in space, upon which our military has come to be extremely dependent, will provoke an “arms race,” and countries which are ordinarily described as no match for American might are endowed with superpower capabilities, from which they refrain only so long as America will not cross the Rubicon of “weaponizing” space.
James Oberg writes in USA Today on the seemingly contagious hyperventilation about this heated issue, from a somewhat different perspective. Oberg suggests that the arms controllers who so virulently denounce research for space-based systems could actually be helping to provoke the sort of response by Russia and others of which they warn—a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. Oberg’s article is a fine one. It does not, however, address the separate issue of whether America should be taking steps to protect its assets in space, and moreover to use the advantages of such strategic high ground to protect its homeland, allies, and troops on the Earth’s surface.
Without specifying any systems, Oberg claims that space has already been weaponized, off and on, but mainly by other countries:
Weapons have occasionally been deployed in space for decades, without sparking mass arms races or hair-trigger tensions. These are not just systems that send warheads through space, such as intercontinental missiles or the proposed global bomber. These are systems that put the weapons into stable orbits, circling Earth, based in space. And these systems were all Russian ones, by the way, most of them predating President Reagan’s “Strategic Defense Initiative” to develop an anti-missile system.
An extended excerpt:
Is the sanctity of the heavens about to be violated by the United States making a unilateral introduction of aggressive weapons that could spark a destabilizing arms race? Is the White House about to unleash an unprecedented expansion of regions to fight over in the future?
You’d be forgiven for thinking so, based on news reports in recent weeks and on complaints from foreign countries such as Russia and China. …
But a sober reality check can put the issue into better perspective. … the impetus for a future foreign “reaction” doesn’t need a genuine U.S. “action”—it only needs the near-hysterical ranting from American newspapers, from lobby groups posing as “information centers” but having long-familiar agendas, and from foreign nations eager to score cheap propaganda points. By whipping up anxieties with little rational justification, these self-serving fear mongers may actually lead to the creation of something well worth fearing: the arming of a new battleground, out in space.
We’ve seen it before, nations reacting not to threats but to illusory phantoms, or to badly reasoned deductions. Russia is particularly vulnerable to such manipulation, from the major defensive weapons systems it fielded to counter U.S. armaments that appeared only on the pages of Aviation Week, to scary space hardware it actually built to combat what it saw as “soldier-astronauts” aboard militarized Gemini, Apollo and space shuttle vehicles.
In recent years, historians have revealed that Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev bankrupted his country’s space program by demanding that his engineers build a copy of NASA’s space shuttle because his advisers persuaded him that the United States wanted to use it for bombing Moscow. Aside from the waste, building such hardware created new hazards to everyone involved.
Now come the newest stories that echo down the interconnected corridors of the American mainstream media, about “killer satellites” and “death stars” and “Rods from God” bombardment systems—as if the Hollywoodized terminology wasn’t a clue that most of the subject matter was equally imaginary.
Take the opening paragraph of a recent Christian Science Monitor editorial that denounced what it portrayed as “the possible first-ever overt deployment of weapons where heretofore only satellites and astronauts have gone.” But history reveals an entirely different reality.
Weapons have occasionally been deployed in space for decades, without sparking mass arms races or hair-trigger tensions. These are not just systems that send warheads through space, such as intercontinental missiles or the proposed global bomber. These are systems that put the weapons into stable orbits, circling Earth, based in space. And these systems were all Russian ones, by the way, most of them predating President Reagan’s “Strategic Defense Initiative” to develop an anti-missile system.
But it’s not the equipment that’s important (that’s why the United States never responded to earlier Russian space weapons); it’s the offensive capabilities the hardware is supposed to deliver. That’s what must be considered foremost before considering the likelihood of responses.
The reality of space
So scary tales about U.S. “death stars” hovering over target countries promising swift strikes from space rely merely on readers not understanding the basics of orbital motion in space. A satellite circles Earth in an ever-shifting path that passes near any particular target only a few times every 24 hours, not every 10 minutes. It’s quicker and cheaper to strike ground targets with missiles launched from the ground.
Nor is a space rendezvous robot, such as those under development by half a dozen nations and commercial consortia, a “space weapon”—despite media claims that one of them, the Air Force’s XSS-11 satellite, could perform as a weapon. Plenty of productive peaceful rationales for these vehicles exist, from refueling to repair to resupply, and they are going to be deployed in large numbers in coming years. …
(Article)
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