Militarising Space: Quantum Leaping Backwards

Felicity Hill, WILPF

I would like to thank the United Nations Department for Disarmament Affairs for inviting me to speak to you today about outer space.

I'm going to focus my remarks on militarising space as opposed to weaponising space or missile defences. Firstly I am going to link the debate on preventing an arms race in outer space to a parallel debate taking place in the Security Council and the General Assembly on the prevention of conflict and war itself. Secondly I will survey some recent events and some of the technologies being explored. Thirdly I will discuss the role of corporations in this debate and finally I will conclude with some thoughts on how the international community might respond.

Taking war into space is not a new idea. The development of rockets by the Nazi's is well known. In the 1960s the Soviets had an orbital weapon called a "killer satellite". It was supposed to use a radar-guided, two-orbit profile to identify and lock on to its target. Since the to-orbit timing was slow, attempts to create a one-orbit "kill" using infrared guidance were tried but were notably unsuccessful. The Soviets also had an orbital weapon known in the US as a FOBS - fractional orbit bombardment system. The idea was to place a hydrogen bomb in low Earth orbit so that it could be quickly launched to a ground target if needed. The system was secretly tested from 1966 to 1970 and the Soviet government revealed that it had 18 FOBS launchers in their inventory at Tyaratam.. The civilian population never knew that thermonuclear bombs, about a thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, were orbiting above their heads.

While taking war into space is not a new idea, a new determination exists on the part of the United States to further militarise space. The building of weapons systems in space is far from inevitable. Though technological difficulties will not in themselves prevent the US from moving ahead, these difficulties are very real and formidable. Rather than waiting and seeing, or holding off opposition because "nothing has been deployed yet," there is a lot of time for political opposition in the US itself and worldwide to organize, grow and successfully oppose the Star Wars project. I feel sure that despite coercive consultations, this opposition will grow in civil societies and among many governments. There is only a narrow window for the opposition to be effective--for if the United States moves ahead with its Star Wars scheme it will be difficult to put this genie back in the bottle. Other states may respond in kind, leading to an arms race and ultimately war in space.

The disarmament community that has (not) dealt with PAROS - preventing an arms race in outer space - might find it useful to reflect on the debate on preventing war itself, the central mandate of the United Nations, a recent chapter of which opened in a Security Council open session in November of 1999 . As many would be aware, the Secretary General has just issued a report on the Prevention of Armed Conflict (S/2001/574) as requested by the Security Council in its second open debate on this subject in July of 2000. The report contains references and lessons relevant to the fora and governmental departments focused on disarmament and security.

In his report to the General Assembly and Security Council, Secretary General Kofi Annan takes the opportunity to repeat the consistent fundamental principle of the United Nations: that governments should discourage competitive arms accumulation and create an enabling environment for arms limitation and reduction agreements as well as the reduction of military expenditures, which by the way, are up to about 90% of Cold War spending. He discusses this obvious fact in the context of reflecting on the "pitiful lessons" to be learned by the past decade of humans slaughtering and impoverishing one another in conflict. Surely the arms race of the Cold War, the horror and cost of which is so fresh in our memories, is one of those pitiful lessons. The question many governments and activists are now asking in this so-called post Cold War era when facing the prospect of missile defences and the militarisation of outer space is, have we learnt our lessons or are we about to extend those mistakes to another generation?

Kofi Annan notes that the evolution of disarmament norms is a continuous process, but that small arms and missile have no international framework. The small arms conference recently held in New York is the first step along the path to regulating the arms trade, and the Governmental Expert Panel on Missiles is a first baby step on that issue. But the PAROS debate is not progressing, and the issue is not being handled well in the Conference on Disarmament, or in the GA, and all the while certain governments are openly saying that they plan to militarise space, to fight into, through and from space. This is an outright violation of the spirit and the letter of the 1967 Space Treaty, which refers only to weapons of mass destruction with mention of military activities in general, which are covered in article IV; "The moon and other celestial bodies shall be used by all States Parties to the Treaty exclusively for peaceful purposes. The establishment of military bases, installations and fortifications, the testing of any type of weapons and the conduct of military manoeuvres on celestial bodies shall be forbidden."

Kofi Annan recommends that exchange of information and other forms of transparency in armaments and on military matters would be a useful early warning mechanism, and can lead to restraints in weapons acquisition, and can help discourage excessive or destabalising accumulation of weapons.

The Secretary General also observes that war costs a great deal of money - quoting the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, which estimated that at least USD $ 200 billion was spent on the seven major interventions in the 1990's, in Bosnia Herzegovina, Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, the Persian Gulf, Cambodia and El Salvador (not including East Timor and Kosovo). A preventive approach would have cost the international community 130 billion dollars, a saving of 70 billion dollars. Focusing on the financial cost ignores loss of lives, homes, bridges, and damaged traumatised children who have not been saved from the scourge of war because the governments of the world have not properly used treaties or the United Nations itself that were designed to mediate competing interests and pursue long-term collective common interests. Rather they have build up their militaries, spending money on "military action that could be available for poverty reduction and equitable sustainable development."

The Secretary General concludes his report by saying that the international community is still far from a culture of conflict prevention and the question he asks is "why is conflict prevention still so seldom practiced, and why do we so often fail when there is a clear potential for a preventive strategy to succeed?"

When a document of the US Space Command called Vision for 2020 came out in early 1998 it was an alarming but apparently laughable document, written by people who had consumed too much Star Trek. The Trekkies who wrote it are now in power, and the alarmists, the conspiracy theorists, have been proven right - missile defences are just the thin edge of a much larger project referred to as "Full Spectrum Dominance" in Vision for 2020. This concept is reinforced by the Rumsfeld Commission which states, "…the US government should vigorously pursue the capabilities called for in the National Space Policy to ensure that the President will have the option to deploy weapons in space to deter threats to and, if necessary, defend against attacks on US interests…..Unlike weapons from aircraft, land forces or ships, space missions initiated from earth or space could be carried out with little transit, information or weather delay. Having this capability would give the US a much stronger deterrent and, in a conflict, an extraordinary military advantage."

The connection is that the potential exists now to stop the militarisation of outer space. Preventive strategies are needed now on the part of governments and NGOs to address the clearly stated intention of the United States to militarise space in violation of the 1967 Space Treaty. Prevention is much easier when the culprits confess, or proudly advertise, their intention to quantum leap us backwards into the worst elements of the Cold War wherein the bulk of human and economic resources were devoted to the science of suicide, genocide and ecocide.

It is well known that the US is developing laser technology for use in space. I would like to focus here on some of the lesser well-known technologies under consideration, research or development.

The Long Range Plan was portrayed as US Space Command’s "deliberate effort to extend the national defence planning horizon and ensure military space is postured to exploit future opportunities and meet future challenges" out to 2020. USSPACECOM foresaw a role for itself in "dominating the space dimension of military operations to protect US national interests and investment…[and] integrating space forces into warfighting capabilities across the full spectrum of conflict." To accomplish these objectives, four operational concepts are envisaged:

• control of space — the ability to assure or deny access to and freedom of operations within space;
• global engagement — combining integrated focussed surveillance and missile defence with a potential ability to apply force from space;
• full force integration — the integration of space forces and space-derived information with air, land and sea forces and information; and
• global partnerships — augmenting military space capabilities through exploitation of civil, commercial and international space systems.

An August 5 New York Times story confirmed this, "Space planners envision a high-tech arsenal that will take full advantage of the military potential of space ranging from the near-term possible to long-term notional kinetic energy rods, microwave guns, space-based lasers, pyrotechnic electro-magnetic pulses, and so on, it said. A microwave gun on board, a 200-pound micro-satellite could emit a pulse of microwaves and fry the electronics of the enemy satellite permanently."

In a U.S. Air Force research study, "Weather as a Force Multiplier" issued in August, 1996, seven U.S. military officers outlined how HAARP and aerial cloud-seeding from tankers could allow U.S. aerospace forces to "own the weather" by the year 2025. Among the desired objectives were "Storm

Enhancement," "Storm Modification" and "Induce Drought." According to the Air Force report, "In the United States, weather-modification will likely become a part of national security policy with both domestic and international applications."

Within 30 years, the Air Force foresees using Weather Force Support Elements with "the necessary

sensor and communication capabilities to observe, detect, and act on weather-modification

requirements to support U.S. military objectives" by "using airborne cloud generation and

seeding" techniques being developed at the time, the 1996 Air Force report says.

Another relevant project in this scheme is HAARP which stands for "High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program." It's a joint project of the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory and the Naval Research Laboratory. HAARP is a series of antennas aimed up at the farthest reaches of the ionosphere high above a frozen wasteland in Alaska. The HAARP complex sends and receives radio waves through the skies and studies how atmospheric changes caused by the transmissions distort and delay how the signals pass through space. The studies might allow military planners to design new communication systems in future space vehicles. Advanced systems might be able to alter the ionosphere in a controlled way to establish new communications capabilities while interfering with other satellites. One of the prime goals of the project is the manipulation of the electrojet. If the electrojet touches down on Earth, it can blow out a major power grid, thus depriving a large region of electricity. When HAARP is completed, it will be able to warm specific areas of the ionosphere until they produce a curve-shaped lens capable of redirecting significant amounts of electromagnetic energy. These reflected electromagnetic beams may be in microwave or ultraviolet range and could be used as a weapon either to incinerate a forest or oil reserve or to selectively kill living things.

The HAARP project is linked to other research and military facilities, so it, like the missile defence plans, cannot be considered in isolation. One such facility is the network of SuperDARN radars, the stated purpose of which is to form a "network of high latitude high frequency radars which will contribute to the goal of US Arctic Research Initiatives. These goals outlined in the SuperDARN grant proposal are to 'improve the predictability of disturbances in space and their effects on high altitude communications, electric power grids, satellite orbital stability and defence systems.'

Another piece in the ionsopheric puzzle is to be the SMES - Superconducting Magnetic Energy Storage) facility being built near Anchorage Alaska. It is a ground-based energy-storage facility for directed-energy weapons. It is expected to have a magnetic field of 30,000 - 40,000 Gaus (the Earth's magnetic field is about 0.5 Gaus).

While some of these projects have direct military applications, others are more likely legitimate research projects. However, they are characterised by a rashness, an uncontrolled curiosity and a willingness to experiment with our life support system - to see what it does and how it will work. The risk of potentially irreversible costs to humans and to the biosphere cannot be ruled out.

Who are the main beneficiaries of militarising space? Corporations. The line between corporations and government in the United States is blurred in the extreme. Bruce Jackson, vice president of the corporate strategy and development at Lockheed Margin, the world's largest weapons manufacturer, claims that he wrote the Republican Party's foreign policy platform. In a recent interview, Jackson said that although he was the overall chairman of the Foreign Policy Platform Committee at the Republican convention, he hasn't led the advocacy for the full development of Star Wars because "that would be an implicitly conflict of interest with my day job" at Lockheed Martin. Such advocacy, he said, has fallen to Stephen Hadley, the deputy director of National Security Council. Before joining the Bush administration, Stephen Hadley was a partner in the Washington law firm of Shea & Gardner which represents Lockheed Martin. Dick Cheney's wife Lynn has just resigned from the board of Lockheed Martin, and Dick Cheney has been on the board of TRW.

Since Republicans took control of the House in 1995, weapons industry PAC contributions have

favored Republican congressional candidates by a margin of 2 to 1. In this election cycle alone, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon and TRW have given over $2 million to the 25 most hard-core NMD boosters in the Senate who signed a recent letter from Jesse Helms to President Clinton threatening to kill any U.S.-Russian arms agreement that puts ANY limits on the scope of future NMD deployments. These companies also spent $34 million on lobbying during 1997-98, and they have helped finance a series of pro-NMD breakfasts on Capitol Hill in conjunction with the National Defense University Foundation and the National Security Industrial Association (the weapons industry’s largest trade association).

Some other developments in brief:

- The U.S. recently gave the go-ahead for development of the Space-Based Laser, a $20 to 30 billion program. The Space-Based Laser's builders: Boeing, TRW--and Lockheed Martin.

- TRW Inc. has been awarded a seven-year, $564 million follow-on contract to develop and deliver Battle Management Command, Control, and Communications (BMC3) products for the Ground-based Midcourse Defense Segment (GMDS - formerly National Missile Defense) program by its prime contractor, The Boeing Company.

- Boeing is moving 1,100 jobs in its Human Space Flight & Exploration (HSF&E) business from

Southern California to Florida and Texas. The company says it is "...to better support its customers, United Space Alliance and NASA."

- A $216 million contract was issued last month for the initial design of MEADS, which is intended to knock down short-range missiles. It is the first defense initiative ever begun on the basis of technical requirements devised by the Pentagon and its international partners.

- According to its own webpage, the Mitsubishi Corporation experienced a rise in profits in the missile field of 632% from 1999 to 2000.

There are some encouraging signs. In an August 13 article in the UK Times, the former Defence Minister of the UK, Peter Kilfoyle, has urged the Labour conference to unite in opposition to US missile defence plans. His call underlines the deepening anger within the party over Tony Blair's supportive attitude towards the Bush administration. More than 200 Labour MPs have backed a Commons motion opposing the plan. NGO activities in the UK, especially around the Fylingdales have raised awareness about the complicity of the UK in missile defence and the militarisation of space. A public opinion poll, conducted by MORI on behalf of a coalition of UK-based arms control organisations, shows that 70% of British voters agree with the statement: "The development of the US missile defence system will encourage other countries to build more advanced nuclear weapons".

At the UN First Committee in October, 2000 Canada declared: "Outer space has not yet witnessed the introduction of space-based weapons. This could change if the international community does not first prevent this destabilizing development through the timely negotiation of measures banning the introduction of weapons into outer space. It has been suggested that our proposal is not relevant because the assessment on which it rests is either premature or alarmist. In our view, it is neither. One need only look at what is happening right now to realize that it is not premature. There is no question that the technology can be developed to place weapons in outer space. "There is also no question that no state can expect to maintain a monopoly on such knowledge -- or such capabilities -- for all time. If one state actively pursues the weaponization of space, we can be sure others will follow."

Opposition from outside the US is being fortified by opposition within the US Congress. Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-Cleveland) has announced his intention to introduce legislation to ban the weaponization of space. "The time has come to ban the further weaponization of space,"Congressman Kucinich said. "We must work toward the elimination of all nuclear weapons, and an end to policies which cause this country to move toward the weaponization of space. I was pleased with the recent news from our neighbor to the north that Canada is ready to join an international effort to prohibit weapons in space. It is time for the United States to take the lead and end the weaponization of space. My bill will call for an immediate and permanent termination of research, testing, manufacturing, production and deployment of all space-based weapons systems and components by any person, agency or contractor of the U.S. government." Kucinich will introduce the Space Preservation Act of 2001 this autumn.

On August 3, 2001 Representative Richard A. Gephardt accused the Bush administration today of an obsession with missile defense and of pursuing a unilateralist approach to world affairs that risks antagonizing Russia and undermining relations with Europe. Mr. Gephardt, the House minority leader, vowed to unite Democrats and persuade Republicans to forge a bipartisan majority in Congress to block any missile defense system that would violate the 1972 Antiballistic

Missile Treaty.

Rebecca Johnson of the Acronym Institute has proposed that rather than re-opening with a view to strengthening the 1967 Space Treaty and thereby possibly endangering it, 'it is time for a group of states concerned about keeping space peaceful to take the lead and establish a conference somewhere outside Geneva to look into these issues, with a view to preparing and then negotiating a Treaty to Prevent War in Space. The first step would be to convene preparatory meetings and then full negotiations on a Treaty to Prevent War in Space (Space Sanctuary Treaty), to halt further militarisation, prevent weaponisation and a future war in outer space, and to preserve space as a sanctuary for exploration, communication, verification and non-violent purposes of benefit to life on Earth.'

She goes on to say that, "since some military activities are already carried on in space, it will be important to agree clear definitions and parameters on what types of activity are to be permitted, regulated or prohibited. While some may wish to demilitarise space altogether, I think it is more feasible at this stage to concentrate on preventing future weaponisation and on seeking agreement to regulate military activities rather than the purer but considerably more difficult objective of banning them. It is also important to recognise that while the majority of satellites do have a military purpose, many are also increasingly useful for verification purposes.

The negotiations envisaged on a Treaty to Prevent War in Space would have to cover at least three main components:

It has not been my purpose to look into missile defences directly, but US plans for missile defence means that we cannot avoid addressing these wider issues of the militarisation of space.

While the research and the monetary allocations are progressing, the militarisation of space is not inevitable. Some governments, and key groups within governments are rising to the challenge of opposing space militarisation and upholding treaties and agreements such as the one reached at the 2000 NPT Review Conference, and this should continue with the support of the increasingly active NGO networks and coalitions forming to halt these developments. In over 100 countries actions are planned for October 13, 2001 coordinated by the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space. What we need is an alliance of NGOs governments and commerical enterprises that are not dependent on the militarisation of space but rather have an interest in space not becoming a battleground. The coming months will be crucial.

Thank you for your attention.