Militarising
space is
quite unnecessary
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments to JonatPower@aol.com
May 27, 2005
LONDON - Space shoots off in all
directions, and so it seems does U.S. Secretary of
Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, a long time aficionado of the
subject. But not for him the dreamy, floating hotels of
Richard Branson's imagination. Rumsfeld's intentions are
on a grander, more intimidating, scale: to ensure that
the U.S. militarily dominate not just the terrain of
earth, not only the mighty ocean depths and the skies
above but also the deep indigo of the weightless world
beyond, and in so doing confirm in heavenly spades that
no one will ever pull a fast one on the U.S., coming at
it from the vast unknown.
After 22 years of work and $100
billion spent, and with the Pentagon still admitting that
from an earth-based launch pad it cannot reliably destroy
the threat of an incoming ballistic missile, it is
difficult not to be amazed that the U.S. should want to
up the technological and financial ante in this way.
European diplomats are incredulous at the Pentagon's
sense of timing- to let this story come out just when the
U.S. in engaged in delicate negotiations at the current
review conference of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty
to try and persuade the world that the U.S. is truly
interested in limiting the means of warfare. A senior
Russian diplomat has said that if the U.S. goes ahead
with this project Russia would have to react, possibly
using force.
During the time of the Clinton
Administration, Rumsfeld chaired two important
commissions. The first, now well known, concluded that
the threat of a ballistic missile attack was "evolving
more rapidly" than had previously been thought. The
second, which received much less press notice, was that
the U.S. some day might face a "Space Pearl Harbor" with
a sneak attack on all America's precious communication
satellites orbiting the earth. Space warfare had become
"a virtual certainty", Rumsfeld said at the
time.
In his early days in office
Rumsfeld argued publicly that the U.S. must develop
"power projection in, from, and through space." Then the
issue dropped out of sight until last week's reports.
Naively perhaps, some of us had thought Rumsfeld, forced
to do his sums in the era of the vast budget deficit, had
come down to earth. Not a bit of it.
Space war has been a recurrent
political theme since the fright America got when the
Soviet Union launched its Sputnik in 1957. President
Lyndon Johnson, not long after, said, "Out in space,
there is the ultimate position- from which total control
of the earth may be exercised". President Ronald Reagan
launched his Strategic Defense Initiative, the so-called
"star wars", meant to deploy space-based weapons to shoot
down incoming missiles. He found his way blocked by a
Democratic Congress.
But Reagan's notion pales besides
that of Rumsfeld's. Rumsfeld has always talked of the
need for America's total domination of space. It must be
large enough and so all encompassing, argued his report,
that any counter measures by other countries would be
quickly nullified.
This is the ultimate in American
unilateralism. It will not only make enemies where they
don't exist, it will make friends in NATO wonder if they
will be pressed to make up the alliance's inevitable
shortfall in more run-of-the-mill programs whilst
American indulges itself in its space
fantasies.
The Cold War with Russia is
supposed to be over. China is presumed not to be an
enemy. Israel, India and Pakistan are friends. So who is
going to go behind America's back and get organized for
space warfare if America sits on its hands? As for North
Korea and Iran why would they want, even if they could,
to launch a nuclear missile attack on the U.S. when they
would meet devastating retaliation? If anyone wants to do
a nuclear 9/11 they will carry it in in a suitcase or run
it in in a small boat or plane.
As for the offensive use of space,
what is the point of such over-kill when all it adds is
extra speed to the way the U.S. can bomb an enemy? Not
one country is even attempting to match America's
overwhelming firepower as it now is. Russia has given up
and China's out of area programne remains very
modest.
"Man's reach must exceed his grasp,
or what is heaven for?" wrote Robert Browning. But not in
his wildest poetic imagination could he have imagined
that a new earthly empire at the onset of the third
millennium, full of its conquest of the Soviet Union and
European communism, would be eyeing the total military
control of space to ensure that no would-be enemy- one
that everyone else believes doesn't exist- would be out
to creep up on America in the far beyond. But, it seems,
it "doth work like madness in the brain" of Secretary
Rumsfeld.
Copyright © 2005 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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