JANUARY 22, 2019
Beginning to fill in his
declaration of last year about turning space into a war zone and establishing a
U.S. Space Force, President Trump was at the Pentagon last week promoting a
plan titled “Missile Defense Review.”
As The New York Times said
in its headline on the scheme:: “Plans Evoke 1983 ‘Star Wars’ Program.”
Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and
Nuclear Power in Space, called it “provocative and destabilizing and basically
insane.”
As Trump stated at the Pentagon on
January 17: “We will recognize that space is a new war-fighting domain with the
Space Force leading the way. My upcoming budget will invest in a space-based
missile defense layer technology. It’s ultimately going to be a very, very big
part of our defense and obviously of our offense.”
The new United States space
military plan comes despite the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 that designates
space as a global commons to be used for peaceful purposes. The U.S., the
United Kingdom and then Soviet Union worked together in assembling the treaty.
It has been ratified or signed by 123 nations. The release of the 100-page
“Missile Defense Review” follows the Trump announcement, also at the Pentagon,
in June, that he is moving to establish a U.S. Space Force as a sixth branch of
the U.S. armed forces. He stated then: “It is not enough to merely have an
American presence in space, we must have American dominance in space.”
The component of the “Missile
Defense Review” that closely resembles the “Star Wars” program of President
Reagan involves what it describes as “space-based interceptors.”
As The Times said: “In
the most contentious proposal, the report embraced Reagan’s Star Wars plan of
putting weapons in space to shoot down enemy missiles during ascent.” The
Times also noted that “the document was careful to describe the step as
largely a research project—for now.”
Of this component, the “Missile Defense Review” states:
“The space-basing of interceptors
also may provide significant advantages, particularly for boost-phase defense.
As directed by Congress, DoD will identify the most promising technologies, and
estimated schedule, cost, and personnel requirements for a possible space based
defensive layer that achieves early operational capability for boost-phase
defense.”
The Reagan Star Wars program also
utilized a defense rationale—it was formally called the Strategic Defense
Initiative. It was based on orbiting battle platforms with nuclear reactors or
“super” plutonium systems on board providing the power for hypervelocity guns,
particle beams and laser weapons. Despite its claim of being defensive, it was
criticized for being offensive and a major element in what the U.S. military in
numerous documents then and since has described as “full spectrum dominance” of
the Earth below that the U.S. is seeking in taking the “ultimate high ground”
of space.
Gagnon, whose Maine-based
organization has been a world leader since its formation in 1992 in challenging
the weaponization of space, said: “The new Trump space proposal is a key
element in Pentagon first-strike attack planning sold to the public as ‘missile
defense’. The system is not actually designed to protect the U.S. from
every nuclear missile launched at us—that would be a mathematical
impossibility. This Star Wars system would only work as the ‘shield’ to be used
to pick off Russian or Chinese retaliatory responses after a U.S. first-strike
sword is thrust.”
He said “we know this because the
Space Command,” the division of the U.S. Air Force which Trump seeks to have
succeeded by a separate Space Force, “has been computer war gaming such a
scenario for years—they call it the ‘Red team’ versus the ‘Blue team.’”
“The kicker” regarding the U.S.
space military plans, said Gagnon, “is that the costs would be colossal—what
the aerospace industry has long said would be the ‘largest industrial project
in human history.’ The only way the U.S. can pay for it is by cutting Social
Security, Medicare, Medicaid and by twisting the arms of NATO members to pony
up more money.”
The Outer Space Treaty was
spurred, as Craig Eisendrath, who had been a U.S. State Department officer
involved in its creation, noted in the 2001 TV documentary that I wrote and
narrate, “Star Wars Returns,” by the Soviet Union launching the first space
satellite, Sputnik, in 1957. Eisendrath said “we sought to de-weaponize space
before it got weaponized…to keep war out of space.”
It provides that nations
“undertake not to place in orbit around the Earth any objects carrying nuclear
weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction, install such weapons
on celestial bodies, or station such weapons in space in any other manner.”
In recent decades, Canada, Russia
and China have been leaders in pushing a treaty that would broaden the Outer
Space Treaty—the Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space (PAROS) Treaty. This
treaty would not only ban nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction
but any weapons in space. But U.S. administration after administration,
Democrat and Republican, have refused to support the PAROS Treaty, thus
providing a veto of its passage at the United Nations.
The new “Missile Defense Review”
is explicit in how the U.S. “will not accept any limitation or constraint on
the development or deployment of missile defense capabilities.”
The announcement of the new U.S.
space plan came a day after the U.S. confirmed it would initiate under the
Trump administration a withdrawal from another treaty, this one between the
U.S. and the then Soviet Union, limiting nuclear missiles, the
Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty of 1987.
Russia is warning that the “Missile Defense Review” will fuel an arms race in space. An Associated Press story out of
Russia last week reported: “The Russian Foreign Ministry described the new U.S.
strategy as a proof of ‘Washington’s desire to ensure uncontested military
domination in the world.’”
“It warned that the expansion of
the U.S. missile defense system ‘will inevitably start an arms race in space
with the most negative consequences for international security and stability.’”
The “’implementation of its plans
and approaches will not strengthen security of the U.S. and its allies,’ the
ministry said in a statement. ‘Attempts to take that path will have the
opposite effect and deal another heavy blow to international stability.’”
The AP story said: “The Russian
Foreign Ministry described the review as an attempt to reproduce President
Ronald Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ missile defense plans on a new technological level
and urged the Trump administration to ‘come to its senses’ and engage in arms
control talks with Russia.”
Meanwhile, Defense News last week questioned whether Congress will fund the “Missile Defense
Review” proposals. It said that “unless Congress approves the major funding
increases that will be required to make it a reality, many of those programs
may fall by the wayside—and questions are emerging over whether these systems
will be funded by the Democratic House of Representatives that is looking to
cut defense spending.”
Professor Francis A. Boyle,
professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law,
who has long written about space military and weaponization issues, ties the
new space plan to where the Reagan Star Wars plan got its name: “Well Lucas
Films and its successors,” stated Boyle, “have done all they can to keep their
Star Wars franchise alive for the past four decades and milk it for all it’s
worth. And now the Pentagon will be keeping their Star Wars franchise and
milking it for all its worth.”
This is being done, of course,
with the zealous promotion of Darth Trump.
More articles by:KARL
GROSSMAN
Karl Grossman, professor of journalism at State
University of New York/College at Old Westbury, and is the author of the
book, The Wrong Stuff: The Space’s Program’s Nuclear Threat to Our Planet. Grossman is an associate of
the media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). He is a
contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion.
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