U.S. leads in preparing for war in space
By Steven Lee Myers
Sunday, March 9, 2008
WASHINGTON: It does not take much imagination to realize how badly war in space could unfold. An enemy - say, China in a confrontation over Taiwan, or Iran staring down America over the Iranian nuclear program -
could knock out the U.S. satellite system in a barrage of antisatellite weapons, instantly paralyzing American troops, planes and ships around the world.
Space itself could be polluted for decades to come, rendered unusable.
.."The fallout, if you will, could be tremendous," said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association in Washington.
The consequences of war in space are
in fact so cataclysmic that arms control advocates like Kimball
would like simply to prohibit the use of weapons beyond the earth's atmosphere.
But it may already be too late for that. In the weeks since a U.S. rocket slammed into an out-of-control satellite over the Pacific Ocean, officials and experts have made it clear that
the United States, for better or worse, is committed to having the capacity to wage war in space. And that, it seems likely, will prompt others to keep pace.
What makes people want to ban war in space is exactly what keeps the Pentagon's war planners busy preparing for it: The United States has become so dependent on space that it has become the country's Achilles' heel.
"Our adversaries understand our dependence upon space-based capabilities," General Kevin Chilton, commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, wrote in congressional testimony on Feb. 27, "
and we must be ready to detect, track, characterize, attribute, predict and respond to any threat to our space infrastructure."
Whatever Pentagon assurances there have been to the contrary, the destruction of a satellite more than 130 miles, or 200 kilometers, above the Pacific Ocean a week earlier, on Feb. 20, was an extraordinary display of what Chilton had in mind - a capacity that the Pentagon under President George W. Bush has tenaciously sought to protect and enlarge.
Is war in space inevitable? The idea of such a war has been around since Sputnik, but for most of the Cold War it remained safely within the realm of science fiction and the carefully proscribed U.S.-Soviet arms race. But a dozen countries now can reach space with satellites - and, therefore, with weapons. China strutted its stuff in January 2007 by shooting down one of its own weather satellites 530 miles above the planet.
"The first era of the space age was one of experimentation and discovery," a congressional commission reported just before Bush took office in 2001. "We are now on the threshold of a new era of the space age, devoted to mastering operations in space." One of the authors of that report was Bush's first defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and the policy it recommended became a tenet of U.S. policy:
The United States should develop "new military capabilities for operation to, from, in and through space."..
The Chinese strike, and now the Pentagon's, have given ammunition to both sides of the debate over war in orbit.
Arms control advocates say the bull's-eyes underscore the need to expand the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which the United States and 90 other countries have ratified. It bans the use of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on the Moon.
Space, in this view, should remain a place for exploration and research, not humanity's destructive side. The grim potential of the latter was hinted at by the
vast field of debris that China's test left, posing a threat to any passing satellite or space ship. The Pentagon said its own shot, at a lower altitude, would not have the same effect - the debris would fall to earth and burn up.
The risk posed by space junk was the main reason the United States and Soviet Union abandoned antisatellite tests in the 1980s. Michael Krepon, who has written on the militarization of space, said the Chinese test broke an unofficial moratorium that had lasted since then. And he expressed disappointment that the Pentagon's strike had damaged support for a ban, which the Chinese say they want in spite of their 2007 test.
"The truth of the matter is
it doesn't take too many satellite hits to create a big mess in low earth orbit," he said.
The White House, on the other hand, opposes a treaty proscribing space weaponry; Bush's press secretary, Dana Perino, says it would be unenforceable, noting that even a benign object put in orbit could become a weapon if it rammed another satellite.
A new American president could reverse that attitude, but he or she
would have to go up against the generals and admirals, contractors, lawmakers and others who strongly support the goal of keeping U.S. superiority in space.
And so,
research continues on how to protect U.S. satellites and deny the wartime use of satellites to potential enemies - including work on lasers and whiz-bang stuff like cylinders of hardened material that could be hurled from space to targets on the ground. "Rods from God," those are called.
For now,
such weapons remain untested and, by all accounts, impractical because the cost of putting a weapon in orbit is huge. "It is much easier to hold a target at risk from the land or sea than from space," said Elliot Pulham, who heads the Space Foundation, a nonprofit group in Colorado Springs.
