John Mecklin -- Why Star Wars should remain a cinematic fantasy

Why Star Wars should remain a cinematic fantasy

John Mecklin

Pages 135-136 | Published online: 28 Jun 2019

• https://doi.org/10.1080/00963402.2019.1630101

 

If space war erupts, they won't be coming to rescue us.

Swashbuckling military action in outer space occupies a hallowed place in American (and ergo world) popular culture. From the 1930s on, Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon comic books¹1. See: https://thebulletin.org/2012/11/buck-rogers-and-the-atomic-education-of-america/.View all notes featured rocket ships and outer space derring-do on a recurring basis, and these heroes’ battles against the forces of evil (including, of course, the unforgettable Ming the Merciless²2. See: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0027623/characters/nm0585481.View all notes) fit naturally into movie serials that were followed up by mostly terrible TV adaptations. Those early fictional space moviemakers inspired modern imitators who took the conventions of the space serial and used advanced special effects to adapt them for modern film (the Star Wars series) and television (the Star Trek franchise) audiences. From 1966 on, the world knew to set its phasers on stun, so as not to kill unnecessarily, but to keep the photon torpedoes at the ready, just in case of Klingons.

In the 1980s, fiction and reality fused in a genuinely unfortunate way. US President Ronald Reagan proposed a missile defense program – the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) – that was quickly nicknamed “Star Wars” after the enormously popular 1977 film full of light sabers and ray-gun blasters (not to mention a Death Star that obliterates planets with a beam of directed energy). The technology of the 1980s was nowhere well-enough developed to shoot down nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles with space-based lasers, as President Reagan and his advisers had proposed. In fact, the SDI program that the movie-actor-turned-president announced with such fanfare in 1983³3. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=4hGLBA65tZg.View all notes had so little technological grounding that the New York Times called it, at the time, “a pipe dream, a projection of fantasy into policy.”⁴4. See: https://www.nytimes.com/1983/03/27/opinion/nuclear-facts-science-fictions.html.View all notes

But fantasy can have real-world impact. Reagan turned back from an agreement with Soviet Secretary General Mikhail Gorbachev on large cuts in and perhaps even the elimination of US and Soviet nuclear arsenals – in part because of the president’s insistence⁵5. See: https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/strategic-defense-initiative-sdi.View all notes on continued pursuit of an SDI program that was little more than a wish. Even now, some three decades of research, development, and testing later, the US missile defense system is technically deficient, insufficiently tested in combat-like conditions, easily defeated by countermeasures, and, somewhat paradoxically, extremely destabilizing to the nuclear balance of power.⁶6. See: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00963402.2018.1486597and https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00963402.2018.1486575.View all notes

Now, US military efforts, show business, and outer space are merging once again, under another president with a background as an entertainer. In February, US President Donald Trump announced the establishment of a Space Force, which the White House described as a sixth US military branch (while, simultaneously, noting that the new branch would “initially be established within the Department of the Air Force”). A White House fact sheet full of martial language says the president had directed the Defense Department to put forward a legislative proposal that would “[o]rganize, train and equip our space warfighters with next-generation capabilities” so as to “[m]aximize warfighting capability and advocacy for space while minimizing bureaucracy.”⁷7. See: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/president-trump-establishing-americas-space-force/.View all notes

I asked six top experts to weigh in on disparate aspects of the current state of global military competition in space. Perhaps not so remarkably, five of them – Russian researcher Alexey Arbatov, longtime US defense analyst Lawrence Korb, Joan Johnson-Freese and David Burbach of the US Naval War College, and UN space security fellow Daniel Porras – found their assignments leading them to advocate not for “warfighting capability,” but for arms control that might short-circuit the dangerous and destabilizing outer space-oriented arms race that already has begun. The sixth author, longtime science writer Jeff Hecht, wrote about the current state of laser technology, finding that it has improved over the three decades since the initial proposal for a space-based “Star Wars” missile defense program, but still is not ready for prime time: “The new enthusiasm for lasers in space is not exactly a sequel. Usually the characters in a sequel have learned something from their experience in the earlier films. So far it looks more like a remake, in which different actors in an updated setting repeat the mistakes of the original characters with more modern equipment.”

As Arbatov points out in “Arms control in outer space: The Russian angle, and a possible way forward,” space has been used for military purposes – for trials of ballistic missiles and ballistic missile interceptors, for tests of nuclear explosives, for deployment of military satellites and anti-satellite systems, and more – for seven decades. In recent years, however, the United States, Russia, China, and India have started down the more dangerous path of space weaponization, by, among other things, testing missiles that can shoot down satellites in low-level orbits. Weapons capable of targeting the early warning satellites that circle Earth at much higher orbits – these are the satellites that warn nations of ballistic missile attack – would be extraordinarily destabilizing and make nuclear war distinctly more likely. There is no reason to think weapons that can target early warning satellites won’t be fielded, unless the major nuclear nations agree to undertake negotiations on new arms control measures aimed at limiting space-related weaponry.

As the major powers of the world race to build military services dedicated to operating in space, it would be well to remember that, outside the movies, space war will involve little swashbuckling. If (as the Trump administration has so incautiously put it) significant “warfighting” occurs in space, Luke Skywalker won’t zoom to the rescue, and the results – the kind of high-tech, worldwide, conventional and nuclear “air-space warfare” that Arbatov describes – will be a show no sane person wants to watch.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See: https://thebulletin.org/2012/11/buck-rogers-and-the-atomic-education-of-america/.

2. See: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0027623/characters/nm0585481.

3. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=4hGLBA65tZg.

4. See: https://www.nytimes.com/1983/03/27/opinion/nuclear-facts-science-fictions.html.

5. See: https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/strategic-defense-initiative-sdi.

6. See: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00963402.2018.1486597 and https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00963402.2018.1486575.

7. See: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/president-trump-establishing-americas-space-force/.

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Author information

John Mecklin

John Mecklin is the editor in chief of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.