Pages 135-136 | Published online: 28 Jun 2019
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
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/.
Additional information
Author information
John Mecklin
John Mecklin is
the editor in chief of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
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