Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

6

Space: The Ultimate Imperialist Project

Our vision calls for prompt global strike space systems with the capability to directly apply force from or through space against terrestrial targets.

—AIR FORCE SPACE COMMAND,

Strategic Master Plan, Federal Year 2004 and Beyond

Space offers attractive options not only for missile defense but for a broad range of interrelated civil and military missions. It truly is the ultimate high ground. We are exploring concepts and technologies for space-based intercepts.

—PAUL WOLFOWITZ,

deputy secretary of defense, October 2002

Whoever has the capability to control space will likewise possess the capability to exert control of the surface of the Earth.

—GENERAL THOMAS D. WHITE,

air force chief of staff, November 29,1957

On March 23, 1983, in a speech promoting greater defense spending against the Soviet Union, President Ronald Reagan challenged the “scientific community”—”those who gave us nuclear weapons”—and Americans in general to launch a huge research and development (R&D) effort to create an impermeable antimissile shield in space. He would call this endeavor the Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI, and, in his vision, it would employ new high-concept technologies such as chemical lasers in space and on Earth to make nuclear weapons forever “impotent and obsolete.”¹

The proposal was meant in part to deflect a large-scale antinuclear movement that had developed in the United States and that had, the previous June, put almost a million protesters on the streets of New York. It was promptly attacked by these same critics and derisively labeled “Star Wars” (after director George Lucas’s space opera). However, Reagan proved why he was known as the “Teflon president.” He promptly appropriated the term. (“If you’ll pardon my stealing a film line—the Force is with us.”) And so a vast military-industrial undertaking to conquer and militarize space began into which billions of dollars have since been poured.²

As it happened, Reagan’s impenetrable shield in space was a mere fantasy and, over the years, all that remains in practicable terms is a fabulously expensive, ground-based, minimalist antiballistic missile system. A series of futuristic conceptions, still in various stages of research and, in some cases, actual development, is aimed not at protecting the American people from a nuclear attack by another country but at the future control of the planet from space and the militarization of the heavens. These new devices included not only antisatellite satellites but weaponry in space that could be fired at Earth.

On the air force’s developmental drawing boards, for instance, are ideas that would once have been found only in science fiction novels, including the aptly nicknamed “Rods from God,” officially known as “Hypervelocity Rod Bundles.” These are meant, according to reporter Tim Weiner of the New York Times, “to hurl cylinders of tungsten, titanium, or uranium from the edge of space to destroy targets on the ground, striking at speeds of about 7,200 miles an hour with the force of a small nuclear weapon.”³ Another futuristic weapons program, according to Weiner, “would bounce laser beams off mirrors hung from space satellites or huge high-altitude blimps, redirecting the lethal rays down to targets around the world.”

Far closer to actual deployment is the CAV, or Common Aero Vehicle. According to Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, it will be “an unmanned maneuverable spacecraft that would travel at five times the speed of sound and could carry 1,000 pounds of munitions, intelligence sensors, or other payloads.”⁴ Part of Donald Rumsfeld’s planned “Global Strike Force,” it theoretically could hit any target on Earth with a massive dose of conventional munitions on a half hour’s notice and the first generation of such weapons is now scheduled to be ready in 2010.

Although, as far as we know, the Bush administration has not officially issued a presidential directive that would allow the deployment of U.S. weaponry in space, Weiner reports that the air force has been pushing hard for such a directive. Whether made official or not, the militarization of space has clearly been on the secret agenda for some time. Somewhere between boondoggle and imperial venture, the program to conquer the “high frontier” is also essentially a program for creating the equivalent of bases in space where, once the issue of militarization is settled, no SOFAs would be necessary. There would be no foreign governments to negotiate with, pay off, or placate; no issues of crime and justice to sort out. Best of all, the weaponizing of space enables us to project power anywhere in the world from secure bases of operation. It is, by definition, the global high ground.

Nonetheless, of all the high-frontier weapons into which R&D money has been poured since President Reagan’s speech, only one—the distinctly Earth-bound “defensive shield”—has come into even partial being. That is the modest antiballistic missile (ABM) defense system being installed at Fort Greely, Alaska, and Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. It is no longer—as Reagan envisioned—focused on defending against a massive nuclear strike by a major enemy but on a tiny strike or even an errant missile from a “rogue state” like North Korea.

How this came to pass, after the Soviet Union disappeared and the threat of a missile attack receded, is a tale about the military-industrial complex at its most persistent. As the Pentagon commentator Alexander Zaitchik has observed, “The line connecting missile defense and space weapons is direct, thick, and no secret.”⁵ In the 1990s, neoconservative lobbyists joined with big arms manufacturers and ambitious military officers, none of whom actually cared whether a national missile-defense system could stop a nuclear attack. Their interest was in the staggering sums such a project would require. By manipulating a Republican Congress and creating a missile defense lobby in both houses, they achieved all their goals, although actual missile defense remained as distant as ever. General Eugene Habiger, head of the U.S. Strategic Command in the mid-1990s, said, “A system is being deployed that doesn’t have any credible capability.” Philip Coyle, former assistant secretary of defense for test and evaluation in the Clinton administration, concluded that the United States had squandered over $100 billion dollars of taxpayers’ money on a “high-tech scarecrow.”⁶

The neoconservative mind-set that brought this project to fruition also had its origins in the Reagan years, when many young strategists, usually with neither military service nor war experience on their resumes, became impatient with the influence of internationalists and realists—the people who had dominated U.S. foreign policy making since World War II. They were also convinced that the collapse of the Soviet Union had been significantly due to U.S. technological prowess and that pouring more money into advanced technology was a sure way to achieve perpetual domination of the world. The only real debate among them was over whether American hegemony “would be welcomed as the cutting edge of human progress,” or overwhelming American power—”shock and awe”—would be enough to terrify others into submission.⁷ They were committed to ending all arms control treaties that constrained U.S. power, to a vast expansion of spending on armaments as well as futuristic armaments research, and to a belief that the planet could easily be mastered from the high frontier of outer space. A typical member of this group was Frank Gaffney Jr., founder of the Center for Security Policy (CSP), creator of the congressional missile defense lobby, and behind-the-scenes player in the policy shifts of the 1990s that would lead to the near-weaponization of space.

Gaffney’s views are close to those of the neocon polemicist Richard Perle, with whom he worked in the late 1970s in the office of the Democratic senator Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson, from Washington State, home of the Boeing Corporation. Jackson influenced both men through his passionate anticommunism and his easy acceptance of the title “senator from Boeing.” Gaffney went on to become a staff member of the Senate Armed Services Committee from February 1981 to August 1983. President Reagan then appointed him deputy assistant secretary of defense for Nuclear Forces and Arms Control Policy, under his mentor Richard Perle. Rather like John Bolton in the second Bush administration, Gaffney distinguished himself at the Pentagon by his hostility to all arms control agreements. In 1987, the new secretary of defense, Frank Carlucci, let both Perle and Gaffney go, and Gaffney set out on his new career as a promoter of space weaponry.

When Gaffney returned to civilian life, he created the CSP, which set out to challenge the government’s intelligence on the dangers of future nuclear missile threats from “rogue nations” and to promote the defense of our space assets. The CSP is funded primarily by the major weapons manufacturers in the missile defense field—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), and others—and by conservative donors such as the Coors family, Richard Mellon Scaife, and the Colorado heiress Helen Krieble.⁸ CSP has received well over $3 million in corporate donations since its founding in 1988.

The first major success of Gaffney’s special-interest-funded think tank came in 1994, when Republican representatives Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey released their “Contract with America”—a political platform with which the Republican Party hoped to regain control of Congress. It contained a plank that called for “renewing Americas commitment to an effective national missile defense system by requiring the Defense Department to deploy anti-ballistic missile systems.”⁹ An American ABM was the only weapons program included in the contract, and Gaffney took credit for having persuaded Gingrich and Armey to include it.

After the Republicans became the majority party in Congress in 1994, their leaders discovered that they still could not move decisively on missile defense because many of the members were suffering from “sticker shock.” The Congressional Budget Office estimated that a basic ground-based system against only a minimally armed “rogue state” would cost up to $60 billion. Republican representative Curt Weldon, an advisory board member of CSP, decided that the best and most time-honored way to rouse the American people and their representatives to action would be to scare them to death. As a result, he obtained passage of a resolution calling for the creation of a special commission to assess the rogue-nation ballistic-missile threat to the United States. This commission, chaired by Donald Rumsfeld, issued its report in July 1998. Crucially, it disputed the CIAs estimate that any nation without a large and advanced industrial base would need at least ten years to fifteen years to build a ballistic missile, claiming instead that a mere five years would be sufficient.

In an incisive analysis, Michelle Ciarrocca and William D. Hartung, weapons experts at the World Policy Institute, pointed out that the congressionally mandated commission was anything but impartial on such matters. Most of its members were affiliated with the CSP and were eager to opt for a worst-case scenario by systematically ignoring the difficulties involved both in missile development and in the miniaturization of the nuclear warhead to be fitted to it. “The five year estimate was based in significant part on briefings from missile engineers at major U.S. defense contractors, including Lockheed Martin and Boeing—hardly unbiased sources, given the billions their firms stand to gain from building a missile defense system to thwart the alleged threat posed by Third World ICBMs.”¹⁰

The Rumsfeld report, unbalanced and deceptive though it was, achieved what the high-frontier congressmen, militarists, and industrialists behind it wanted. In mid-March 1999, both houses of Congress overwhelmingly passed the National Missile Defense Act, which declared: “It is the policy of the United States to deploy a national missile defense.” Just before the House voted, Donald Rumsfeld, then a civilian who had served as secretary of defense over twenty years earlier, gave a ninety-minute briefing to some 250 of its members.¹¹ In recognition of his services, Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy later bestowed its Keeper of the Flame Award on him at a gala fund-raising dinner.

There was still one major obstacle—the president himself. Bill Clinton was by then adept at capitulating to right-wing pressures from both parties as part of a strategy of co-opting Republican positions and then not implementing them. He had already allowed several billion dollars to be spent on national missile defense, but on September 1, 2000, he decided not to deploy the ABM system. “I simply cannot conclude with the information I have today that we have enough confidence in the technology, and the operational effectiveness of the entire NMD [national missile defense] system, to move forward to deployment.” He would, he declared, leave to his successor the decision whether or not to build it.¹² Unfortunately for the country and the world, five months later George W. Bush became president and Donald Rumsfeld returned to the Pentagon.

In addition to the missile defense commission s report of 1998, Rumsfeld brought with him a second report that urged the secretary of defense to prepare for possible warfare in space. He had chaired the group that wrote this inflammatory report just as he had the first missile-defense commission. The Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization delivered its final report to Congress on January 11, 2001, a few days before Bush was sworn in and Rumsfeld took over the Department of Defense. The report was the brainchild of the congressional missile defense lobby, which got it through Congress as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2000 and stacked the commission with seven—out of thirteen—members from aerospace companies that would benefit directly from any expanded space weapons programs. Many of them were former admirals and generals who had retired into highly compensated positions as executives or board members of munitions companies. The 2001 report they produced famously warned that the United States “is an attractive candidate for a ‘space Pearl Harbor,’“ and went on to state:

The United States must develop, deploy, and maintain the means to deter attack on and to defend vulnerable space capabilities. Explicit national security guidance and defense policy is needed to direct development of doctrine, concepts of operations, and capabilities for space, including weapons systems that operate in space and that can defend assets in orbit and augment air, land, and sea forces. This requires a deterrence strategy for space, which in turn must be supported by a broader range of space capabilities.¹³

Statements of congressional commissions usually go unread and have little lasting influence. But the two Rumsfeld documents—the one from 1998 on missile defense and the 2001 report on protecting space assets— have assumed the status of holy writ even though both are biased and partisan in the extreme. As Michael Dobbs reported in the Washington Post, “Since the beginning of the Bush administration ... and Rumsfeld’s reappointment as Defense Secretary, the conclusions of the Rumsfeld Commission have been elevated to quasi-doctrinal status within the government, according to several officials. ‘Nobody dares say a word against Rumsfeld, at least in public,’ said one government nonproliferation expert.”¹⁴ The country was thus finally committed to building and deploying a system to destroy nuclear weapons delivered by missiles and ultimately to place weapons in outer space.

It is important to stress that at present no country has antisatellite weapons in space, that the only country talking about a possible space war is the United States, and that the only threat ever uncovered to U.S. space assets was six handheld Global Positioning System ground-jammers that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed. Nonetheless, air force spokesmen have used the 2001 report to insinuate that a space war is both inevitable and now a settled part of military doctrine.¹⁵ They have enthusiastically manufactured threats that serve their own institutional interests, not the security of the United States.

The head of the Air Force Space Command, General Lance Lord, has led the charge. “Space superiority is not our birthright, but it is our destiny,” he told an air force conference in September 2004. “Space superiority is our day-to-day mission. Space supremacy is our vision for the future.” “Simply put,” he said to Congress, “it’s the American way of fighting.” We must have “freedom to attack as well as freedom from attack” in space.¹⁶ The former secretary of the air force and director of the National Reconnaissance Office Peter B. Teets, once the president and chief operating officer of the nation’s biggest arms manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, assured the Air Force Association in a January 2003 speech, “If America doesn’t weaponize space, an enemy will.”¹⁷ Keith Hall, Clinton’s assistant secretary of the air force for space, whom the George W. Bush administration retained, commented, “With regard to space dominance, we have it, we like it, and we’re going to keep it.”¹⁸

On August 2, 2004, the air force for the first time issued a new statement of official doctrine on what it calls “counterspace operations.” According to General John Jumper, air force chief of staff, “Counterspace operations are critical to success in modern warfare.... Counterspace operations have defensive and offensive elements.... These operations may be utilized throughout the spectrum of conflict and may achieve a variety of effects from temporary denial to complete destruction of the adversary’s space capabilities.”¹⁹

None of these military officers shows any interest in the arms race in space that their policies are guaranteed to elicit. Yet, it is inconceivable, observes Theresa Hitchens, an authority on weapons in space and vice president of the independent Washington research organization Center for Defense Information, “that either Russia or China would allow the United States to become the sole nation with space-based weapons.” She quotes a 1998 article in Airpower Journal, by Lieutenant Colonel Bruce M. DeBlois, “Once a nation embarks down the road to gain a huge asymmetric advantage, the natural tendency of others is to close that gap. An arms race tends to develop an inertia of its own.”²⁰ The air force, however, has an answer to such thinking. Everett Dolman, a neoconservative and a professor in the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, the air force’s graduate school for airpower and space power strategists at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, argues, “The time to weaponize and administer space for the good of global commerce is now, when the United States could do so without fear of an arms race there. The short answer is, if you want an arms race in space, do nothing now.”²¹ Dolman thinks it is our destiny to “seize military control of low Earth orbit. Only the United States can be trusted to regulate space for the benefit of all.”²²

Virtually all of the air force’s rhetoric about a future space war is ideological posturing, similar to the propaganda it put out at the end of the Eisenhower administration and the beginning of the Kennedy years about a “missile gap” with the Soviet Union. The purpose then was to beef up the air force’s budget and carve out turf justifying its continued growth as an organization. There was no missile gap, as the leaders of the American government knew from U-2 flights over the USSR and photographs from the first Corona spy satellites.²³ Similarly today, there can be no rationale for a space war because one unintended but unavoidable consequence would be to destroy our own preeminent position in space. A major but little-noticed reason for this is because a conflict in space using antisatellite weapons of any kind would vastly increase the amount of orbiting garbage, which would threaten our whole network of military and commercial spacecraft. That, in turn, would threaten the whole American— even planetary—way of life. Yet space debris is a subject that the air force’s “counterspace doctrine” never so much as mentions.²⁴

Space, particularly in low Earth orbits (LEO), is anything but empty. The space age is hardly forty-five years old and we have already filled its most critical zones with thousands of pieces of lethal junk. The radars of the air force’s Space Surveillance Network can see objects as small as ten centimeters—the size of a baseball—in low Earth orbit and to about one meter in higher geosynchronous orbits, where most of the world’s communications and broadcast satellites reside. The air force is currently tracking some 13,400 man-made objects in space, of which only a few hundred are active satellites. It acknowledges that there are more than 100,000 pieces of smaller, untrackable debris, each about the size of a marble (one centimeter) and millions of still smaller fragments. NASA officials have estimated that there may be about four million pounds of space junk in LEO alone.²⁵ This debris includes dead or dying satellites, pieces of spent rocket boosters, all manner of metal shrouds and fairings, tools, nuts, bolts, and clamps of every size and description, lens caps, and even frozen sewage. In LEO they are traveling at the same speed as the space shuttle—17,500 miles per hour—or they would fall into the Earth’s atmosphere and be burned up.

Astronaut Sally Ride, the first woman in space aboard the Challenger space shuttle in 1983 and 1984, a member of the presidential commission that investigated the Challenger’s explosion in 1986, and a professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego, has been adamant that the use of antisatellite weapons would be “disastrous” because of the debris they would be likely to create. On her inaugural mission in June 1983, an incident fixed her opinion on this subject: “About halfway through the flight there was a small pit in the window of the space shuttle and we didn’t know what it was. An awful lot of analysis was done while we were in orbit to make sure that the strength of the window would sustain reentry. It did. We were all fine. But the analysis afterward showed that our window had been hit by an orbiting fleck of paint, and the relative velocities were enough that the paint actually made a small but visible gouge in the window. Well, a fleck of paint is not the same as a small piece of metal travelling at that same speed. So, as soon as you start increasing the amount of junk in a low Earth orbit, you have an unintended byproduct that starts putting some of your own quite valuable satellites at possible risk.”²⁶

Joel Primack, a professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, agrees: “Weaponization of space would make the debris problem much worse, and even one war in space could encase the entire planet in a shell of whizzing debris that would thereafter make space near the Earth highly hazardous for peaceful as well as military purposes.... Every person who cares about the human future in space should also realize that weaponizing space will jeopardize the possibility of space exploration.”²⁷ Primack observes that the density of debris is already so great at the 900-to 1,000-kilometer altitude (563 to 625 miles) and at the 1,500- to 1,700-kilometer altitude (938 to 1,063 miles) that pieces of junk colliding with each other could set off a chain reaction or cascade of collisions—the Kessler Effect, predicted mathematically in the 1970s by the NASA scientist Donald Kessler—that would make the zones useless.²⁸ The Council on Foreign Relations Study Group on Space Weapons defines space debris as “unguided, hyper-velocity kinetic-energy weapon[s]” and concludes, “Because the United States owns a significant majority of the world’s satellites, it would suffer disproportionately from any increase in the amount of space debris.” Its overall conclusion is that “space weapons are not suited to the threats currently facing the United States in space or are outpaced by terrestrial alternatives.”²⁹ All forms of space weapons, it noted, cost much more than terrestrial weapons systems, which of course do not have to be boosted into orbit, a cost that commercial operators put at between $300 million to $350 million per satellite.³⁰ Earth-based weapons such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), cruise missiles, ICBMs, or submarine-launched intermediate-range ballistic missiles can do anything space-based weapons can, and a Tomahawk cruise missile costs a mere $600,000.

The air force has been conspicuously reluctant to discuss these issues. On September 15, 2004, the Pentagons Missile Defense Agency (MDA) said in a public statement that it was contemplating putting space-based missile interceptors in orbit by 2012 but acknowledged that such “kinetic kill vehicles,” in Pentagon jargon—weapons that destroy their targets simply by colliding with them at very high speeds—would create a great deal of space debris. It noted that a chunk of debris ten centimeters in diameter is likely to be as damaging to an orbiting spacecraft as twenty-five sticks of dynamite.³¹ Nonetheless, it planned to proceed with its antisatellite interceptors.

Some air force officers take the view, despite ample evidence to the contrary, that debris in low Earth orbit does not last long and quickly falls back into the atmosphere where it is burned up. The MDA report states, for instance, that in most cases debris that might be created by a missile-defense intercept would re-enter the atmosphere before completing a full orbit, and therefore would put satellites at risk only briefly. It advocates that vulnerable spacecraft such as the International Space Station and the Hubble Telescope be maneuvered out of the way to avoid collisions with debris. There is some evidence that debris resulting from missiles fired from the Earth might indeed quickly fall back into the atmosphere, but this would not be true of debris from space-based kinetic vehicles.³² Debris from satellites placed in the higher geosynchronous orbits will, of course, never descend into the atmosphere but go on spinning around the Earth forever. That is why much greater attention should be paid to moving spent communications satellites into “graveyard orbits ,” reserved for space junk and off-limits to voyagers and satellites.

Meanwhile, the Orbital Debris Quarterly News, published by NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, continues to monitor and report on what the space garbage is actually doing. The News was first published in August 1996 and is now in its tenth volume. On January 17, 2005, according to the April 2005 issue, the remains of a U.S. Thor 2A upper stage rocket that had been used back in 1974 to put a satellite in orbit rear-ended a large fragment of the third stage of a Chinese CZ-4 launch vehicle that had exploded in March 2000. The collision altered the orbits of both pieces of debris and three more chunks—large enough to be detected and catalogued—were knocked off the old American rocket. Orbital Debris Quarterly News concluded, “As the number of objects in Earth orbit increases, the likelihood of accidental collisions will also increase. Currently, hundreds of close approaches ... between catalogued objects occur on a daily basis. If future spacecraft and rocket bodies are not removed from LEO within a moderate amount of time after the end of [a] mission, e.g., within 25 years, the rate of accidental collisions will increase markedly later in the century.”³³

Despite air force propaganda, there is no way to protect our satellites by putting weapons in space. The only rational active defense would involve building redundancy into our space systems so that the loss of a particular spacecraft would not cripple us; the maintenance of replacement satellites ready to be launched into orbit whenever they are needed; the hardening of electronic components on particularly important satellites against microwave, laser, or other directed-energy attacks; and finally learning how better to disguise the laser, radar, visible, and infrared signatures of satellites, making them much harder to target in orbit.

Thirty years ago, during the period of Japan’s high-speed economic growth, I was in Tokyo talking with an official from that country’s trade ministry. Japan was then, as today, totally dependent on imported petroleum from the Middle East. I pointed out that Japan’s supertankers were highly vulnerable. What, I asked, would Japan do if a hostile power sank one of its tankers in the narrow straits around Singapore? His answer was straightforward: call Lloyd’s Insurance Company. It would be much cheaper to construct a new tanker than to defend the sea-lanes from Japan to the Persian Gulf by building a navy. There is a lesson in this for the United States. We cannot afford our air force’s plans to protect our space assets militarily, and the air force does not know how to do so in any case.

The missile-defense program is easily the most important place to examine the air force’s failures. There are potentially three ways to bring down an ICBM: first, in its boost phase, when the warhead and the rocket are still joined and both are heading up through the atmosphere to outer space; second, after the warhead has separated from the booster and is speeding through space toward its target; and finally, in its terminal phase, the extremely short period (measured in seconds) when the warhead reenters the atmosphere and plunges toward the Earth. The Clinton administration worked only on a midcourse interception by ground-based “kill vehicles.” The Bush administration took over this project and accelerated it but added brand-new and very expensive research objectives: downing a missile shortly after liftoff and during its final descent. Dubbed the “multi-tiered missile defense,” it aimed at giving the United States as many opportunities as possible to stop an incoming missile.

More than five years after George W. Bush committed himself to an initial deployment by election day 2004, elaborate plans had been laid and huge amounts of money spent but nothing had been completed that actually worked. Shortly after June 13, 2002, when President Bush’s withdrawal of the United States from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty became final, Arizona senator Jon Kyl declared that the United States was now dedicated to “peace through strength, not peace through paper.”³⁴ In fact, the ABM Treaty had restrained the only country truly capable of launching an attack on the United States with intercontinental ballistic missiles, namely, Russia, and replaced it with—paper.

Unsurprisingly, the Clinton-era Ground-based Midcourse Defense system, or GMD, as it is known within the Pentagon and the missile industry, remains by far the most advanced and important part of the whole multi-tiered system, as revealed in budget priorities. In the fiscal year 2002 budget, for example, $3,762.3 million was devoted to GMD whereas boost-segment research got $599.8 million and terminal-segment research $200.1 million.³⁵ (Actually, that terminal-phase figure should be increased by $898.7 million, that year’s funding for the Patriot PAC-3 missile, reported separately in the defense budget and the current favorite when it comes to trying to hit a warhead just before impact.)

Meanwhile, the GMD system as it is being conceived and built will, at best, be capable of hitting a single long-range missile or a very few of them launched by a technologically unsophisticated Third World nation like North Korea. Russia has already deployed ICBMs that can defeat any antiballistic-missile system we could conceivably produce, and China will no doubt do so soon. On March 7, 2006, the commander of American forces in South Korea, General Burwell B. Bell, told the Senate Armed Services Committee, “In the years since the late nineties, the last six years, seven years, we have seen very little activity by the North Koreans to actively continue to develop and test long-range missile systems.”³⁶ Nonetheless, three months later, the U.S. military announced that North Korea had a Taepodong-2, its longest-range rocket, sitting on a launching pad fueled and ready for flight. It consists of a set of old Russian Scuds bolted together. The U.S. military claimed that it had a range of up to 9,300 miles, more than enough to reach the U.S. mainland, and that the United States had only a limited ability to shoot down such a missile should North Korea launch it.³⁷ On July 4, 2006, North Korea test-fired this and other shorter-range missiles. The Taepodong-2 crashed after forty-two seconds of flight.

The Ground-based Midcourse Defense system that we have been building against North Korea consists of three separate elements: an array of interceptor missiles housed in silos in the ground that are at least theoretically linked to spy satellites in orbit as well as enormous, terrestrially based X-band radars meant to detect and track missile launches (“X-band” is merely a reference to its wavelength, 2.5-4 cm, which is small and therefore more sensitive; most airliners, for example, are equipped with X-band radars to detect turbulence). All of this equipment is then connected to a battle-management command-and-control center with massive computers for superspeed-processing of data, final determination that a launched missile is hostile, and the ability to transmit commands to launch the interceptors. There are problems with every phase of this, so many in fact that charges of faked tests of parts of it have been commonplace. Some people, myself included, suspect that the GMD is simply a cover for long-term research and development plans aimed not at defense on Earth but at the domination of space.³⁸

It is important to remember that the three approaches to interception—boost phase, midcourse, and terminal—are utterly different and each has its own constraints. Any boost-phase interception, no matter how technologically sophisticated, has to originate fairly close to the launch site of the enemy missile to have any chance of success. Our current missile defense sites, for example, are nowhere near close enough to have a hope of intercepting a Chinese launch from its Central Asian province of Xinjiang. Such a Chinese attack could be intercepted only in the midcourse or terminal phases.³⁹ The terminal phase usually lasts only a minute or two and is currently beyond the data-processing capabilities of our computers. That is why the GMD remains the most important option since it offers the greatest chance of success, problematic as even that may be.

Boeing is the GMD’s prime contractor. As of December 17, 2005, the company had built eight interceptors that were placed in silos at Fort Greely, Alaska, and two more at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. These make up the entirety of the known missile defense system deployed by the United States to date. The Missile Defense Agency has announced that it will not release any further information about future emplacements, even though Fort Greely is scheduled ultimately to house forty interceptors. Victoria Samson of the Center for Defense Information believes that this “unwillingness to give specifics about the program is a sure indicator that things are going poorly.”⁴⁰ She may well be right.

The problems of the GMD itself are legion. The interceptor—technically known as an “exoatmospheric kill vehicle” (EKV)—consists of a two-stage booster, followed by a liquid-fuel rocket that steers it on the last leg of its journey. Its speed should be about 13,400 miles per hour at impact. The interceptors are supposed to carry infrared sensors that will help them determine whether a target is a warhead or a decoy, although so far there is no evidence that these work. Other on-board sensors take over from ground guidance at close range, making the rocket, which does not carry a heavy explosive warhead, somewhat maneuverable. It is designed to destroy the target simply by colliding with it.⁴¹

Test failures have revealed numerous problems with the interceptor. On December 15, 2004, a simulated warhead was fired from Kodiak Island, Alaska, south over the Pacific, but its intended interceptor, launched from the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site at the Kwajalein Missile Range in the Marshall Islands, never left its silo. On February 14, 2005, the Missile Defense Agency tried again. This time the interceptor shut down due to a “software error.” These are peculiar failures since the United States has had decades of experience in missile launches.⁴² Keep in mind that the interceptor has yet to be tested with the much more powerful booster rocket designed for it and intended to give it the necessary speed to intercept a real missile. The surrogate rocket used in the Pacific tests does not produce the vibration and stress that will accompany real-world conditions, which threaten to damage the on-board computer, thrusters, antennas for receiving data, optics for navigating, sensors, and a refrigeration unit for cooling the sensors, which are extremely sensitive to heat.⁴³

The most notorious problem with the tests is that, when the interceptors have actually lifted off, they have been artificially guided to their targets by Global Positioning System homing devices and electronic beacons because our new spy satellite and radar systems for detecting and tracking missiles have not yet been built. We do not yet have the means to detect a hostile ballistic missile coming at us, which means that the interceptors sitting in the ground in Alaska are functionally blind. Defense Department veteran Philip Coyle says that for the GMD system to work in its present condition, North Korea would have to give us advance notice of its intention to launch an ICBM and supply the relevant target information. “To be credible,” Coyle writes, “the GBI [ground-based interceptor] must eventually show that it can hit a target with no targeting aids on-board the target re-entry vehicle.”⁴⁴ It has yet to do so.

There are major delays and cost overruns in other vital parts of the GMD system, particularly the not-yet-built new-and-improved surveillance satellites and a huge X-band radar mounted on a seagoing, oil-drilling rig, which is supposed to be moored at Adak, Alaska.⁴⁵ The probably insurmountable problem that faces the whole GMD system, however, is its inability to distinguish between warheads and decoys in flight. Increasingly, it seems that, in the foreseeable future, no amount of science will be able to overcome this difficulty. Any nation or terrorist group capable of building an intercontinental ballistic missile would have no difficulty in adding a few appropriately painted balloon decoys to its payload. If our interceptor missiles cannot tell one from another, the entire effort is a waste of time and money, a point that serious strategists have long understood. In 1986, the renowned Russian physicist and winner of the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize, Andrei Sakharov, advised the Soviet government that Reagan’s strategic defense initiative could easily be fooled and/or overwhelmed simply by firing decoys along with Soviet missiles and increasing the number of missiles in any assault. There was no reason, he said, to waste money trying to match an American ABM system.⁴⁶ Twenty years later, nothing has happened that would alter his conclusion in any way.

In the weightlessness of outer space, a decoy cannot be detected simply because of its lighter weight. Some experts believe that the new X-band radars and the sensors mounted on our interceptors will sooner or later be able to detect an infrared signature that would distinguish a warhead from a decoy, but there is no test evidence to support this belief.

Professor Theodore C. Postol of MIT, one of our country’s leading authorities on ballistic missile defenses, has been warning about the problem of decoys for many years. In a now famous June 15, 2002, letter to the Boston Globe, Postol wrote: “The current National Missile Defense interceptor tries to identify warheads and decoys by ‘looking at them’ with infrared eyes. Because the missile defense is essentially using vision to tell which objects are decoys and which are bombs, this technique is no more effective than trying to find suitcase bombs at an airport by studying the shape and color of each suitcase.” He concluded: “The [Missile Defense] agency has no technical program for solving this fundamental problem. It has also been unable to provide any credible scientific evidence or analysis to show that it can ever solve this problem. So what it proposes to do is to classify the fact that the targets it is flying [in tests] have been preconstructed in ways that will allow it to tell one from another. This misuse of the classification system to hide the fact that the National Missile Defense System has no credible scientific chance of working is a serious abuse of our security system.”

The decoy problem is one of the reasons why the Pentagon has begun to invest heavily in a boost-phase intercept. This form of attack—while the incoming rocket and its warhead are still coupled and moving relatively slowly into space—would destroy any decoys before they could separate from the missile, thereby solving that problem. There are at least fifty different proposals for developing boost-phase interceptors, but all of them suffer from a fundamental inability to tell whether a missile just after liftoff is carrying a warhead or is merely launching a satellite. In addition, most forms of boost-phase attack, particularly lasers, would not be able to fully disable the warhead, which will surely be heavily shielded and thermally insulated in order to be able to withstand re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere. The danger is that an attack on an ascending rocket will merely knock it off course, causing it to fall back into a neighboring, possibly friendly, country. For example, a missile launched from Iran against Washington, D.C., and attacked in its boost phase would threaten several Middle Eastern countries as well as Turkey and possibly even Europe.⁴⁷ Air force officers and members of the Center for Security Policy do not allow such considerations to worry them, arguing that “collateral damage” may be unavoidable to protect the United States.

There has been a great deal of writing about a space-based boost-phase antimissile laser, but it is at present little more than a concept and would almost surely be too heavy ever to put into orbit. The main research focus for a boost-phase weapon is an airborne laser (ABL). Mounted in the nose of a modified Boeing 747-400F commercial airplane, the ABL’s high-energy laser is expected to be in the megawatt range—more than a million watts. When working properly, the laser would fire a beam of directed energy at the speed of light toward the body of an ascending rocket that might be hundreds of miles from the aircraft, heating its shell until it failed structurally. Whether such a laser would actually produce enough energy is still an open question. The chosen source of directed energy is a chemical oxygen iodine laser that produces energy through the reaction of hydrogen peroxide with chlorine gas. According to Miranda Priebe, a physicist and a research assistant at the Center for Defense Information, “The ABL beam will be generated by several laser modules. When light from these modules is amplified with a resonator (a set of mirrors that must be able to withstand the intense energy of the laser beam), the combined output is a single, powerful beam.”⁴⁸

On December 3, 2004, the prototype ABL aircraft had its first two-hour flight aborted by Missile Defense Agency officials after twenty-two minutes because of a false warning from on-board instruments of an air-pressure problem. Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin share the work with the agency. The ABL’s price is now in the range of $5.1 billion for one fully equipped airplane, twice the original estimate. On March 9, 2005, Lieutenant General Henry Obering, director of the Missile Defense Agency, told the press that the ABL “is not out of the woods yet. I can’t declare that [it is] a totally risk free program.”⁴⁹ His remark was a major understatement.

Leaving aside the fact that putting a high-energy laser aboard an aircraft involves fitting an incredible array of sensors, computers, chemicals, and mirrors into a constricted, dusty, vibrating space, a major problem is weight. The original plan called for fourteen SUV-sized modules working in tandem to generate laser light that would be projected through a telescope mounted in the 747’s nose. However, that idea proved to be impossible, so the number was cut to six modules. Even the six-module system weighs about 180,000 pounds—5,000 pounds more than the original design weight for the fourteen-module scheme—and still puts pressure on the airframe. The Boeing 747-400 freighter, the largest commercial cargo transport in service, can carry a maximum of 248,000 pounds, but this weight has to be distributed throughout the aircraft. The laser consists of six large machines lashed together on the main deck plus chemicals and crew to monitor the laser resonators. In addition, it was discovered on the 2004 test flight that the laser beam ignites dust particles in its path. These produce flickers of visible light called “fireflies,” which weaken the beam’s overall energy. The Missile Defense Agency has decided that the ABL cannot be used at lower altitudes where dust is plentiful, which of course radically reduces the time available for an interception. Similarly, the first flight revealed problems of airframe vibration and atmospheric turbulence that generate what is called “jitter,” which also impedes the laser beam and produces wear and tear on the delicate equipment.

Finally, the heavily laden Boeing 747 lumbers through the sky at a slow speed and is incapable of defending itself. It would thus require fighter aircraft protection in a combat situation, which in turn would necessitate the presence of aerial refueling tankers. It seems likely that any organization adept enough to build an ICBM carrying a weapon of mass destruction could also field a surface-to-air missile, such as the one that, on May 1, 1960, shot down Francis Gary Powers’s U-2 spy plane over Sverdlovsk, Russia, at 70,500 feet.⁵⁰ It is hard to imagine how an ABL lurking within the necessary hundreds of miles of a launch site with a boost-phase interception in mind could be effectively protected, something that will not be lost on an ABL 747’s aircrew.

Terminal-phase interception is not much more promising than the ABL, but at least it is not so esoteric. The chief problem is not detecting the warhead as it re-enters the atmosphere, which is comparatively easy, but designing a missile fast enough to catch it and collide with it in the one or two minutes available. The main weapon the United States proposes to use for this purpose is the Patriot PAC-3 (Patriot Advanced Capability), manufactured by Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control of Dallas, Texas. The PAC-3 is an improved version of the Patriot missiles used during the first war against Iraq in 1991 with such dismal results. (They failed to bring down any Scuds Iraq fired at General Schwarzkopf’s forces or at Israel.) The new one is, however, much faster and without the heavy explosive warhead of its ancestor. PAC-3, however, was never designed for defense against an ICBM warhead but rather for downing shorter-range tactical and cruise missiles. Using a solid propellant rocket motor, the PAC-3 flies at great speed to an intercept point specified by its ground-based fire-solution computer and destroys the target by colliding with it.

According to former assistant secretary of defense Philip Coyle, “Although [the PAC-3] appeared to be doing well in development tests— hitting ten out of eleven targets—those early tests involved the usual artificialities of preplanned intercepts. In more realistic operational tests conducted [in 2002], the PAC-3 hit only three targets out of seven tries, or less than 45 percent.”⁵¹ The main problem with terminal defense is that it can, by definition, protect only a limited area, such as a city. To be effective we would have to deploy innumerable terminal-defense systems all over the country. The deliberate destruction of an atomic weapon over a city or other site might also produce massive nuclear fallout, which could be extremely damaging to the defending country.

By the end of 2004, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld acknowledged that while any planned defense against missile attack would be inadequate, the United States would nonetheless soon have a “modest capacity.”⁵² Two devastating investigations into procurement and testing practices—one by the Missile Defense Agency itself and one conducted by the Government Accountability Office—concluded that the Pentagon had actually sacrificed rigorous testing and quality control in order to meet President Bush’s pledge of a 2004 deployment, and both called for much greater accountability and an end to flagrant cost overruns.⁵³ In October 2005, the Senate Appropriations Committee quietly disclosed that the Pentagon was giving up on trying to make further improvements in its GMD interceptors and that the first generation of ground-based exoatmospheric kill vehicles would also be the last.⁵⁴ Lisbeth Gronlund of the Union of Concerned Scientists reported on the results of this internal criticism: “There is no evidence the GMD system would have any military utility, which is why it has not been declared operational. It is a little-known fact that the Pacific and Strategic military commands, which perform their own assessments separate from those of the MDA, have refused to make it operational.”⁵⁵

In fact, the whole Pentagon effort has been devoted to meeting a non-credible threat from rogue-nation ballistic missiles while ignoring a genuine challenge to the very concept of missile defense—that of Russia and its Topol-M ICBM. As Scott Ritter, a former weapons inspector in the Soviet Union (1988-90) and later in Iraq (1991-98), has observed, “On Christmas Eve 2004, the Russian Strategic Missile Force fired an advanced SS-27 Topol-M road-mobile intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). This test probably invalidated the entire premise and technology used in the National Missile Defense (NMD) system currently being developed and deployed by the Bush administration.”⁵⁶

The Topol-M was Russia’s original answer to President Reagan’s Star Wars fantasies. It was designed during the late 1980s, but Russia did not produce it immediately because of the collapse of the USSR and because it discovered that Star Wars itself could be rather easily defeated by decoys and large numbers of conventional ICBMs. However, on June 13, 2004, the very day that George W. Bush succeeded in killing off the Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972, Aleksei Arbatov, one of Russia’s leading experts on military affairs, advocated in parliament that Russia respond by speeding development of the Topol-M. A year and a half later, on December 24, 2005, Colonel General Nikolai Solovtsov, chief of the Strategic Missile Forces, attended a ceremony at the Tatishchevo missile base in the Volga River’s Saratov region. He was commissioning a new set of Topol-Ms, which he declared to be “capable of penetrating any missile defense system.” The Topol-M was first put into service in December 1998 but was deployed only in silos. An off-road mobile version entered combat service in 2006.⁵⁷ It is a truly formidable weapon.

Among its features are high-speed solid-fuel rockets that rapidly lift the missile into the atmosphere and make boost-phase interception inconceivable unless a defense system were located practically next door to the launcher; hardening and reflecting coatings to protect it against laser weapons; up to three independently targetable warheads and four sophisticated decoys; an ability to maneuver to avoid midcourse or terminalphase missile attacks; and a range of over 6,250 miles. There is no known defense against such a weapon. Diplomacy and deterrence are the only means to ensure that it will never be used, and the Bush administration has repeatedly rejected diplomacy as a useful tool of American foreign policy. The conclusion is unavoidable: Washington has given us at best the illusion of protection against a nuclear attack without reducing the odds of such an attack.⁵⁸

There are so many things wrong with the missile defense program that it is difficult to think of it as merely an ambitious scientific effort having start-up problems. From space debris to the inability to identify clearly a hostile launch or sort out the decoys, its failures suggest that if Congress had even a slightly prudent commitment to fiscal integrity, it might well have scuttled the project long ago. That its members did not even discuss the possibility raises disturbing questions. Did the Bush administration and its Republican associates in Congress actually intend to build a missile defense system or were they only interested in a plausible public relations cover for using the defense budget to funnel huge amounts of money to the military-industrial aerospace corporations? As a cash cow, missile defense goes on enriching its sponsors precisely when it is not working and they have to go back to their drawing boards.

America’s imperial project to dominate the space surrounding our planet has provided a nearly perfect setting for official corruption. The air force and the military-industrial complex interests meshing with powerful congressional lobbies that want to bring space-oriented industries to their districts and perpetuate their own safe seats in Congress, as well as unimaginable sums of money protected from public scrutiny by “black budgets,” “special access programs,” and other forms of secrecy, all add up to a prescription for legal thievery on an unprecedented scale. Norman Ornstein, a specialist on Congress at the American Enterprise Institute, has observed that when individual members of Congress have the ability to earmark—that is, privately attach—federal funds for pet projects and slip them unopposed into the Pentagons budget, “You are creating the most fertile environment for corruption imaginable.”⁵⁹

During the first years of the new century, an array of experienced Pentagon and congressional budget officers began sounding the alarm that the purchase of weapons systems is now totally beyond public control—or often even public visibility. Of all the weapons systems, the most expensive and most prone to misuse and abuse has been the whole project to create an intercontinental-ballistic-missile defense system. At $8.8 billion, it was, after all, the largest single weapons request in the fiscal year 2006 defense budget. The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington estimated that “black budget” requests for fiscal year 2007 amounted to $30.1 billion, the highest level since 1988 during the Cold War, 75 percent of them going to the air force mostly for space programs and new satellites. William D. Hartung, Frida Berrigan, Michelle Ciarrocca, and Jonathan Wingo of the World Policy Institute have summed up our military ventures in space and space defense as “Pork barrel in the sky.”⁶⁰

The raw monetary figures have been literally astronomic. From Reagan’s 1983 “Star Wars” speech to 2006, depending on which expert you listen to, the United States has spent between $92.5 billion and $130 billion on the basic problem of shooting down an ICBM in flight—and that’s without even once having succeeded in doing so.⁶¹ One comprehensive analysis of the ultimate cost of the entire ballistic missile defense system by its distinctly theoretical date of completion in 2015—and excluding its most expensive and problematic component, a space-based laser—is $1.2 trillion.⁶²

There can be no question that the whole system is surrounded by an environment of corruption that has been much aided and abetted by the way Defense Secretary Rumsfeld vastly increased the Clinton administration’s missile defense spending, moved virtually all missile defense projects into the classified budget, and ended normal reports to Congress concerning failures to meet delivery dates, cost increases, and the actual performance of equipment. He also cut some two thousand auditors from the Defense Contract Audit Agency.⁶³ “The Pentagon’s new approach to missile defense testing is a contractor’s dream and a taxpayer’s nightmare,” writes the World Policy Institute’s Ciarrocca. “Pumping in more money while reducing outside scrutiny is an invitation to corruption and cost-overruns.”⁶⁴

In December 2003, Franklin C. “Chuck” Spinney, a former air force officer and for thirty years a budget analyst in the Pentagon, spoke to journalist Bill Moyers about what he called the “moral sewer on the Potomac.”⁶⁵ Perhaps Spinney’s most important insight is that the primary emotion driving this system is not patriotism, greed, or need, but fear. The attacks of 9/11 unquestionably generated real fear, but continuous air force hyperbole in favor of ultra-high-tech projects, presidential statements tying 9/11 to missile defense, and alarmist claims that our dependence on orbiting satellites leaves us no choice but to defend them militarily all capitalize on prevailing fears and undermine a realistic defense.

President Bush is, in this sense, the fear-monger-in-chief. In a speech to the cadets of The Citadel on December 11, 2001, exactly three months after 9/11, the president said, “The attacks on our nation made it even more clear that we need to build limited and effective defenses against missile attack. (Applause) ... Suppose the Taliban and the terrorists had been able to strike America or important allies with a ballistic missile. Our coalition would have become fragile, the stakes in our war much, much higher. We must protect Americans and our friends against all forms of terror, including the terror that could arrive on a missile.” But neither the Taliban nor the 9/11 terrorists had missiles or the knowledge or industrial base to build one. And there are other, far cheaper, more accessible, and more effective ways to deliver a weapon of mass destruction than by missile. For example, one could be secretly imported in a cargo container on a transport ship, or fired from an offshore vessel using a short-range cruise missile, or constructed domestically as did the bombers of the Oklahoma City Murrah Federal Building in 1995, or sent as a priority package via FedEx.

But what if some terrorists really had access to an intercontinental missile? Given that we have in continuous orbit the world’s most effective intelligence satellites devoted to tracking missile launches, as soon as we had determined that such a launch was not an error, we would retaliate instantly and catastrophically against whatever nation had allowed a missile to be fired against us. The government’s own experts agree that a long-range ballistic missile is the least likely way a hostile state or terrorist group would choose to deliver a weapon of mass destruction against a U.S. target.

Why then did the Bush administration increase spending on missile defense in fiscal year 2002 by 43 percent? The answer lies in a complex amalgam of neoconservative ideology, the influence of right-wing think tanks, air force desires to protect what it sees as its “turf” while expanding its share of the DoD budget, powerful congressmen devoted to enriching their districts, lobbies of arms manufacturers who supply virtually unlimited funds to re-elect their friends, and the interests of places like Huntsville, Alabama, which has lived off missiles ever since rocket scientist and former Nazi SS major Wernher von Braun arrived there after World War II to lead the U.S. Army’s rocket development team.⁶⁶

Missile defense has almost nothing to do with defense and nothing whatsoever to do with the war on terrorism. ABM weapons may actually prove to be useless against incoming ICBMs, but they might be highly effective offensive weapons against other nations’ satellites, and this is why almost nothing said officially by the administration, the Pentagon, or the Congress on the subject of missile defense can be taken at face value. These dual-use weapons are less likely to be employed for missile defense than as a stealthy way to introduce weapons in outer space with the intent of dominating the globe.

On December 14, 2004, General Lance Lord, head of Air Force Space Command at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado, repeated to the press what has become an air force mantra: “The war in space began during Operation Iraqi Freedom.”⁶⁷ This overstatement is based on the claim that, at the outset of our invasion of Iraq in 2003, Saddam Hussein attempted to jam the reception of radio signals from U.S. Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites. His men allegedly used six commercially available jammers based on Russian designs and available for purchase on the Internet to try to interfere with our “precision-guided” bombs.⁶⁸ The U.S. military has many uses for the GPS, a system of satellites capable of precisely locating any object or spot on Earth. It is ideal for guiding so-called smart bombs to their targets. Iraq’s handheld jammers turned out to have no influence on the GPS satellites or ground stations and were quickly taken out using GPS-guided munitions. (Jamming instantly reveals the location of the jammer, painting a bull’s-eye on him.) Even if jamming had been successful, the U.S.’s munitions have backup systems, which deliver the bombs only slightly less efficiently to their targets.

“To get big-bucks Congressional funding for space-control schemes,” comments Mike Moore, former editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “a threat to U.S. space assets must be manufactured, and Hussein’s pathetic attempts to jam GPS signals seem to be the best (and only) evidence space warriors can produce to prove’ that space war is already underway. . . . [General Lord’s assertions are] part of a sophisticated public relations campaign waged by the Air Force and Defense Department to persuade the public that space war is here.”⁶⁹

It is certainly true that the Global Positioning System highlights the U.S. military’s remarkable dependence on an array of satellites that orbit the planet, held aloft by the tension between their own speed and Earth’s gravitational pull. They provide our armed forces with intelligence, communications systems of all sorts, computer displays of battlefields in real time, guidance for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) such as the Predator and the Global Hawk and for extremely high altitude manned spy planes such as the U-2. They also provide navigational aids, accurate weather forecasts, and numerous nonmilitary functions. The reliance American forces place on such spy and communications satellites may already constitute a militarization of space but not yet a weaponization of space. Satellites are, in a sense, the opposite of weapons—extremely vulnerable “sitting ducks” following fixed paths around the Earth and an immense boon to all mankind. Their military applications are probably among their least significant uses.

The Global Positioning System (known in the U.S. military as the Navstar GPS) is probably the greatest advance in navigation since the discovery of the compass and the invention of the sextant. It is the general term for at least twenty-four satellites, each circling the Earth twice a day, that are positioned in a “medium Earth orbit” (12,600 to 14,760 miles above the planet). A GPS receiver on a ship, automobile, aircraft, bomb, or a hiker’s handheld navigational device decodes a time signal from four of these satellites, which carry extremely accurate atomic clocks, and then calculates a position based on the different times and distances to the various satellites. As of 2005, the GPS could determine your position at any moment within about sixteen feet (five meters), a steady improvement over the previous fifteen years.⁷⁰ Although created for military use, the GPS is today available to any and all users worldwide, providing strikingly accurate information on position and time in all weather conditions. The GPS has spawned a multibillion-dollar industry in applications, including handheld guidance devices for the blind.

The U.S. military operates over 500,000 GPS receivers, most of them on cruise missiles, precision-guided bombs, and other munitions.⁷¹ It invented the system and launched its first GPS satellite into orbit in February 1978. The cost of maintaining the system is approximately $400 million per year, including replacements for aging satellites. The air force keeps twenty-eight satellites in orbit at all times, four as backups to ones that might fail. Satellites cannot be repaired, have a limited life span, and a failure rate of about two per year. Management of the entire system is in the hands of the Second Space Operations Squadron at Schriever Air Force Base, Colorado.

The air force has not always been a good steward of the GPS, which has evolved over time into a global public utility, not just a guidance system for bombs. Until August 31, 1983, GPS was exclusively a U.S. military system. On that date, Soviet fighters shot down a Korean Air Lines Boeing 747 that had drifted off its flight plan into Soviet airspace. American authorities realized that if the airliner been equipped with a GPS receiver, it could have avoided its catastrophic navigation error. So the air force slowly began making GPS available for civilian use. Today, many commercial airlines integrate GPS tracking into their TV entertainment systems so that passengers can follow the course of their flight on-screen.

From the beginning, U.S. officials knew that they could not prevent other nations or private users from tuning in to its satellites’ signals, and they feared that sophisticated technicians might be able to adapt the GPS to provide guidance for their own cruise or ballistic missiles. The United States therefore required that commercial GPS receivers have limits on the velocities and altitudes at which GPS would supply positions. Moreover, the air force has never thought of itself as a supplier of public goods but rather as an overlord of the globe. Insisting on making civilian and foreign users of GPS dependent on the United States, it implemented something that it called “selective availability,” which degraded GPS’s accuracy by adding signal errors for civilian users—normally about ten meters horizontally and thirty meters vertically. Only the U.S. military and selected allies received the unadulterated data. The air force also retained the ability to switch off GPS on a regional basis and to jam receivers in a war zone. Needless to say, this dependency on the “goodwill” of the United States irritated a lot of people, who began to devise ways to get around selective availability.

One rather expensive solution came to be known as “differential GPS,” useful primarily for geographic imaging, weather forecasting, mining, agriculture, and high-altitude surveying. Differential GPS involves setting up one GPS receiver—the base station—at a precisely known location. The base station then calculates its position based on GPS satellite signals and compares this location to its known location. The difference is applied to GPS data recorded by roving GPS receivers, thereby correcting the selective availability errors.⁷² But the more definitive answer to selective availability was, of course, a GPS system not run as a U.S. Air Force monopoly.

The Russians already had a primitive version of GPS called Glonas (global navigation system), which as of 2004 had only twelve active satellites and was uncompetitive. On May 1, 2000, the United States unilaterally ended selective availability, magnanimously declaring it to be an American humanitarian gesture: “As part of his ongoing effort to bring the benefits of government investments in science and technology to the civilian and commercial sectors, President Clinton ordered that the intentional degrading of the civilian Global Positioning System (GPS) be discontinued at midnight tonight.”⁷³ Nonetheless, the air force retained all its capabilities to limit service, to turn off GPS regionally, and to jam receivers. Slowly and fitfully, the European Union decided to build an alternative, which it named “Galileo.” This satellite navigation system, when operational, will be more accurate and not subject to shutdown for military purposes. When completed it will be available to all world users, civilian and military, and at its full capacity will require only a Galileo receiver. As Rene Oosterlinck, head of the European Space Agency’s Navigation Department, summed matters up, “Europe cannot accept reliance on a military system which has the possibility of being cut off.”⁷⁴

European nations at first were reluctant to put up the money for Galileo and, after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the project almost died. The United States has always recognized that Galileo was intended to break its stranglehold on the use of satellites for navigational purposes, but it did not know what to do about it. The terrorism of 9/11 gave it an opportunity to act. The Bush administration wrote directly to the European Union arguing that Galileo, by ending America’s ability to shut down GPS in times of military operations, would threaten the success of the war on terror. This ploy backfired badly. By mid-2002, virtually all European Union states were on board and had overfunded the project.

Galileo will be a system of thirty spacecraft in orbit—twenty-seven active and three spares—14,514 miles above the Earth. Each satellite has a projected lifetime of twelve years. The system aims at an accuracy of less than a meter, with greater penetration into urban centers, inside buildings, and under trees, a faster fix, and atomic clocks that are ten times better than those on board the GPS satellites. The European Space Agency plans to launch the required thirty satellites between 2006 and 2010, and the system is planned to be up and running under civilian control by 2010.

On December 28, 2005, a Russian Soyuz rocket fired from the old Soviet Cosmodrome at Baikonur, Kazakhstan, carried the first Galileo satellite into orbit—a launch received ecstatically in France, given a hearty “w^rell done” in Britain, and greeted with poorly disguised sour grapes in the United States. As far as the air force is concerned, Galileo has truly slipped the American leash. In September 2003, China joined the project, promising to invest 230 million euros in it. In July 2004, Israel signed on; India joined in September 2005; Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and South Korea all affiliated with Galileo during the winter of 2005-6, each of them paying for the privilege. There was speculation that Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Russia also were considering becoming involved.⁷⁵

The air force itself would be wise to start planning a transition to Galileo instead of becoming paranoid over the prospect that many countries around the world may soon meet or exceed American space-based navigational and guidance capabilities. For example, the U.S. military’s precision-guided Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) GBU-31 bomb, which has wreaked so much nonprecision carnage in Iraq, depends on the GPS. Whether it will work with Galileo or whether the European Space Agency will allow such a militaristic use of its satellites is not known. According to the RAND Corporation, “A particularly glaring U.S. space vulnerability is the constellation of Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites, thanks to our extraordinary dependence on that system.”⁷⁶

Unfortunately for the United States and the prospects for peace, the Air Force Space Command takes this dependency to mean that we must actively defend the GPS and other military satellites by using antisatellite (ASAT) weapons and other space-war devices. There are ways to prepare for and protect against the inevitability of satellite sabotage or failure, but the use of active military measures surely should not be among them. About the only thing ASATs could do is create so much lethal debris in orbital space as to make it useless for all nations for a very long time, perhaps permanently.

As of December 2005, there were approximately 800 active satellites of every sort in operation—exact numbers are not available since military secrecy hides a significant portion of the total American fleet. According to an estimate by the Union of Concerned Scientists, a Washington-based private watchdog organization, 413 of these satellites belong to American companies or the United States government. The Russians operate 87, the European Space Agency about 50, and the Chinese 34.⁷⁷ According to the Satellite Industry Association, revenue from both governmental and commercial customers for manufacturers and operators of satellites was $85.1 billion in 2000 and $97.2 billion in 2004, with the United States accounting for more than three-quarters of all spending.⁷⁸ Since 1998, there have been more commercial satellites in orbit than military ones, and the number of commercial launches each year has exceeded military launches. According to the Center for Defense Information, the U.S. military now uses privately owned commercial satellites for about 60 percent of its communications and that “dependence is growing.”⁷⁹

These commercial satellites do many useful things, most of them taken for granted and rarely thought of as related to satellites. Low Earth orbit, just 200 to 500 miles above the Earth’s surface, is crowded with satellites reporting weather conditions, mapping the Earth’s surface (“remote sensing”), sustaining the U.S. Space Shuttle, the International Space Station, and the Hubble Telescope, studying the size of the ozone hole in the atmosphere over Chile, photographing the damage done by the Southeast Asian tsunami or Hurricane Katrina, and transmitting financial and economic news around the world in real time. Satellites in low Earth orbit are so close to the planet, they must travel at very high speeds, usually about 17,000 miles per hour, so that gravity will not pull them back into the Earth’s atmosphere.

Much farther out in space, the world’s major television networks broadcast to their markets from large communications satellites in geosynchronous or geostationary orbits—abbreviated GEO—over the equator. These satellites orbit at the high altitude of 22,237 miles above sea level, where they are far enough from the Earth’s gravitational pull to approximate the speed of Earth itself as it rotates on its own axis in each twenty-four-hour cycle (just over 1,000 miles per hour). This speed is, of course, much slower than the speed at which the Earth travels around the Sun (67,062 miles per hour). Flying at approximately the same speed that the Earth is turning on its axis, the satellite remains in the same position in relation to the Earth even though both are in constant motion.

In 1945, just as World War II was coming to an end but while London was still under attack from Nazi V-2 rockets fired from the Netherlands, the future science-fiction writer Sir Arthur C. Clarke calculated the height and speed required of a satellite to remain in the same place over the Earth. He published his findings in the magazine Wireless World. No one took his idea seriously at the time, but twenty years later, on April 6, 1965, it became a reality with the launching of Intelsat I, also called “Early Bird,” the first commercial geostationary communications satellite. There are today about thirty such communications satellites covering North America and more than a hundred orbiting the planet in different GEO locations. In 2002, the so-called Clarke Orbit, that is, the band where spacecraft can maintain a geosynchronous position with relation to the Earth, held over three hundred satellites of various kinds.⁸⁰ The fifteen U.S. early-warning satellites monitoring missile launches, for example, are almost entirely in GEO, which is quite crowded.⁸¹ When a satellite finally wears out and ceases to function, scrupulous satellite operators have often provided small rockets and enough fuel to move them a few hundred miles higher into a cemetery orbit, but not all operators can or are willing to assume these costs.

One of the biggest communications satellites is the Department of Defense’s Milstar, the size of a city bus, with electricity-generating solar panels as wide as the wingspan of a Boeing 747 jumbo jet. The six Milstars currently in orbit are the most secure of all the various communications satellites. They resist jamming and their electronics are hardened against the electromagnetic pulse that would accompany a nuclear attack.⁸² In addition to being used for direct broadcasting, these communications satellites act as relay stations, bouncing telephone calls, TV images, Internet connections, and other signals from one part of the world to another.

Many satellite functions are quite mundane. As Richard DalBello, former president of the Satellite Industry Association, explains, “When you go to Wal-Mart to buy a pair of sneakers, the credit card goes up to the satellite, gets validated and approved. Then the same satellite tells Wal-Mart that it just sold a pair of sneakers at your neighborhood store, and Wal-Mart adjusts its inventory accordingly.”⁸³ Our dependency on such capabilities can be starkly revealed when they are suddenly withdrawn. On May 19, 1998, the satellite Galaxy IV, owned by PanAmSat, was in geosynchronous orbit above Kansas. At 6:00 p.m. it suffered a failure of its onboard control system as well as all its backup systems and began to roll aimlessly. Some six hundred stations of the National Public Radio system, the CBS network, CNN’s Airport Channel, the Chinese Television Network in Hong Kong, and the Soldiers’ Satellite Network, which brings entertainment programs to the armed forces, were instantly knocked off the air. Many self-service gas stations found themselves unable to accept credit cards. Private business television networks operated by Aetna, Microsoft, 3M, and the Ford Motor Company shut down, as did the Ohio, Minnesota, and Texas state lotteries. Some thirty-five million personal pagers on the East Coast went dead, causing hospitals and obstetricians’ offices to try frantically to reach doctors via telephone for emergency surgeries and unexpected baby deliveries.⁸⁴

No one knows what happened to Galaxy IV—it seems likely that both the primary and backup onboard computers that navigate the spacecraft without ground intervention failed for unknown reasons. Nonetheless, it is air force doctrine that, until proved otherwise, we should assume that Galaxy IV was attacked by an antisatellite weapon operated by an unnamed hostile power.

Major General Daniel Darnell, head of the Air Force Space Command’s Space Warfare Center at Schriever Air Force Base, has exhorted all satellite operators to assume that any disruption to their spacecraft is most likely a hostile strike.⁸⁵ “The first response when something goes wrong,” he warns, “should be ‘think possible attack.’“ Actually, quite a number of events other than deliberate physical or electronic attack can cause a satellite to fail, including natural radiation emanating from galactic space (e.g., cosmic rays or solar storms), collisions with space debris, or technical malfunction.⁸⁶ The problem is that the air force has no way of knowing which of these things may have caused a particular failure. As the Center for Defense Information’s Theresa Hitchens notes, “The Air Force does not have the capability at this time to ascertain on the spot whether any disruption of satellite operations is due to a malfunction, such as faulty software or space weather, or the result of some sort of deliberate interference or attack.”⁸⁷ As usual, however, the military chooses to follow the worst-case scenario most useful for its future funding needs. As Lisbeth Gronlund, codirector of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Global Security Program, points out, its strategy for space combat is invariably “Fire, Aim, Ready” in that order.⁸⁸

In an effort to “see” what is actually going on in space at any given time, the U.S. Air Force is working on “autonomous proximity operations”—orbital maneuvers that would allow satellites to inspect other satellites, diagnose malfunctions, and perhaps provide on-orbit servicing. The problem is that research in this area is devoted primarily to producing microsatellites, weighing less than one hundred kilograms, and nanosatellites, weighing less than ten kilograms, which the air force disguises to look like space debris and hopes to use to sneak up on other nations’ satellites. These minisatellites would not, however, be on innocent inspection missions. They are designed to surround other satellites and photograph, jam, blind, or collide with them. Microsatellites are inherently dual-use and could function as lethal antisatellite weapons. The main U.S. stealth satellites are in the top-secret Misty series, first put into orbit in 1990, which, by 2005, had reportedly cost us $9.5 billion. Although the air force thought they were undetectable from Earth, the first one was spotted almost at once by amateur space observers in Canada and Europe.⁸⁹

The latest innovation is an experimental microsatellite, XSS-11, that deploys tiny probes to inspect or service spacecraft in distress, according to the carefully worded air force publicity statement. It was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, on April 11, 2005. The plan is for the XSS-11 to remain in space for twelve to eighteen months and inspect six or seven spent rocket stages and dead U.S. satellites. Some space watchers have speculated that the XSS-11 is actually testing antisatellite concepts to disable enemy craft.⁹⁰

Jeffrey Lewis of Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs reports on two joint British-Chinese experimental microsatellites of fifty kilograms each, whose controllers were able to maneuver within nine meters of a Chinese target satellite. Lewis concludes, “If the Chinese were to conduct a proximity maneuver near a U.S. satellite, the reaction [in the Pentagon] would be apoplectic.”⁹¹ Nonetheless, Theresa Hitchens warns, “There will be a price to pay the first time a U.S. anti-satellite weapon shoots down an innocent Chinese communications satellite because a crucial widget on a U.S. satellite conked out due to faulty manufacturing processes.”⁹²

These problems will only get worse. In order to protect our nation’s and others’ space assets from the air force’s hubris and incompetence, we must relearn how to cooperate with our fellow inhabitants of the planet and take the lead in crafting international agreements on the rules of the road in space, particularly treaties to control weapons in space. We need to agree, for example, that a country’s technical means of observing and verifying what other nations are doing are never appropriate targets of anti-satellite or other kinds of space weapons. We should outlaw all weapons that are designed to destroy other nations’ reconnaissance and surveillance satellites. This was the principle contained in the old Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which we foolishly abandoned in accordance with the recommendations of the 2001 Rumsfeld space commission. The reason is that if one side blinds another, the country that is blinded is almost compelled to conclude that it is being set up for an attack and should therefore use everything it’s got, including nuclear weapons, in retaliation.

The United States has greatly damaged the integrity of international law by refusing to be constrained by its norms, even though no nation needs international law more than we do. International law offers guidelines to acceptable behavior for all nations, rich and poor, and, since violations of the guidelines invite retaliation, it provides deterrence against illegal behavior. The current cluttering of key orbits with debris, for example, reflects a lack of cooperation and our own shortsighted imperialist arrogance. Without any rules on space debris, a poor state with few technical capabilities could decide to blind the United States by the active deployment of space garbage. Such a genuinely “rogue state” could, for instance, detonate a nuclear weapon in space, which is banned by the 1967 Outer Space Treaty but is actively discussed in every military headquarters around the world, particularly since the United States pays so little attention to treaty obligations. Such a detonation would not kill anyone and would not create a worldwide “nuclear winter,” but its electromagnetic pulse would instantly fry the electronics in all orbiting satellites. Even more low-tech, a desperate state could simply send up a few rocket loads of gravel into low Earth orbit.⁹³ The resulting collisions would instantly level the global playing field: no more American smart bombs, no more electronic battlefields, no more global positioning systems, no more secure communications among troops in battle and commanders in rear areas. Instead of obtaining multilateral agreements that would ban such actions, the United States continues to waste its money building space-based antisatellite weapons.

Space weapons are not simply a strategic problem. They are both the cause and the result of several pathological developments in our political and economic system. The iron triangle of the air force, Congress, and the military-industrial complex, sanctified by the high-tech jobs it offers to American workers, is driving our country toward bankruptcy. For some, it is tempting to continue the lucrative practice of buying arcane space technologies that do not work—missile defenses, for example—simply because it keeps people employed. Meanwhile, our democracy is undercut by members of Congress who use the lavish “campaign contributions” they receive—bribes by any other name—to buy elections. The only public business these bought-and-paid-for congressmen attend to is providing a legal veneer for munitions makers’ unquestioned access to the tax revenues of the government. The proper use of a vital human resource— the space we occupy in the universe—is a matter for profound philosophical deliberation. Space has also become, unfortunately, an arena for American hubris and one more piece of evidence that Nemesis is much closer than most of us would care to contemplate.