Space
weapons: hardware, paperware, beware?
by
James Oberg
Monday, November 13, 2006
On
November 8, Russian president Vladimir Putin obliquely warned the United States
to not start a “space arms race”. His words, addressed to “some
nations” but unambiguously referring to the US, denounced those “seeking
to untie their hands in order to take weapons to outer space, including nuclear
weapons.” He then complained about “stagnation in the sphere of disarmament,
which is far from out fault”—referring to previous Russian proposals
for banning space weapons.
How
did Putin (and the head of his military intelligence agency, at whose celebration
Putin was speaking) come to this conclusion? Was it something the spies had discovered,
or was it just something he had read? And what are the real barriers to credible
and effective international agreements to prevent the use of force in outer space?
Are the Russians really as innocent as Putin claims?
It
is undeniably scary that a veteran Russian cosmonaut, Valentin Lebedev, can describe
the following scenario on Moscow television recently, and be widely believed.
“When the Americans return to the Moon, they will build a base of global
control [the Russian word implies ‘monitoring’] for all launches of
missiles from Earth,” he predicted, adding that they are also trying to trick
Moscow into going bankrupt over a project to send cosmonauts to Mars. “And
of course,” he concluded, “they will not allow on the moon anyone who
wants it.”
There
certainly have been enough printed accusations of US war plans for outer space.
Just as one example, an ABC story dated October 18th and titled “U.S. Says
‘Keep Out of My Space’” devoted the bulk of the story to relaying
the opinions of Craig Eisendruth, a former diplomat who is identified as the co-author
of a book on space weapons coming out shortly (co-authored with Helen Caldicott,
a well-known crusader against US military policy).
Warns
Eisendruth, “We’re going to be testing weapons towards the end of the
year—deployment will follow.” And the article’s subtitle, “New
National Space Policy Favors Weapons in Orbit”, unambiguously endorsed this
claim. And it was far from the only such press story around the world that week.
US
space weapons: science fact or fiction?
What
about the “space weapons” whose tests Eisendrath (and others) claim
are imminent? He was referring both to a military project called NFIRE, part of
US research on missile defense, and other more secret projects. As for NFIRE,
this experiment has been widely reported—and widely misrepresented—for
several years, with allegations that it is a prototype space-to-space anti-satellite
weapon.
ABC
News had earlier run exactly such a story (still online), calling the planned
test the “first step towards weapons in space.” Author Marc Lallanilla
quoted “one senior government official and defense expert” as criticizing
NFIRE because “We’re crossing the Rubicon into space weaponization”
the official continued, asked to remain unnamed.
“Weapons
in space are not inevitable,” the official added. “If it were, it would
have happened already,” suggesting instead that “We should instead be
taking the lead to make [weapons] agreements with other countries.”
Lallanilla
displays instinctive one-sidedness in his reporting, writing (for example) that
“after the former Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957, the U.S.
military began to develop and deploy satellites for communications and reconnaissance,”
but saying nothing about Soviet military (and even weapons) developments and deployments
in the same timeframe. The official he quotes also seems to share this mistaken
belief that no weapons have ever appeared in space before (the Soviet Union—but
not the United States—did this in the 1960’s, 1970’s, and even
the 1980’s at least).
The
author’s oversight is not surprising, since as it turns out, Lallanilla had
never covered space before (or since): he specializes in “lifestyle”
subjects, as can be verified by googling his name. With that background (or lack
of it), it’s hard to comprehend how he could have found and won the trust
of an “inside source” like the one he claims to be quoting (see my rebuttal
article at MSNBC.)
But
NFIRE, as with many other experiments over the past 20 years (including one conducted
aboard the space shuttle mission STS-39), isn’t quite so obviously a “space
weapon” or even a “prototype weapon”. It is only aimed at characterizing
the visibility of rocket plumes in space (which are very different from such plumes
in the atmosphere) as detected by sensors looking across a pure vacuum. The information
is critical to evaluating the practicality of hitting enemy missiles during their
first minutes of flight, perhaps by ground-or air-launched interceptors stationed
just across the border, or even perhaps from space-borne platforms passing overhead.
Whatever
the eventual course of such experiments (and space-based interceptors face a significant
and probably insurmountable challenge in deploying and maintaining an adequate
numbers to provide uninterrupted coverage of enemy missile sites), the technology
is not applicable to anti-satellite weapons for orbital combat. The reason is
based on physics, not politics. Orbiting satellites are coasting, and so do not
display the massive rocket plume that for thrusting missiles provides the signature
to aim at. Any sensor developed for the missile application would never see a
satellite sharply enough to aim a weapon at it.
Such
anti-missile systems are not space weapons in that sense, based on real-world
technological limitations. And even if they (and thus all similar weapons systems)
were, the existing Russian anti-missile installations around Moscow and at test
ranges would also go to the head of the line as in-place space combat forces—but
they never seem to be mentioned. NFIRE is no poster child for “peace in space”
campaigners, if described accurately and honestly.
Views
of a veteran “space warrior”
What
else might the Pentagon have up its sleeve (or “down its silo”) along
the lines of space combat hardware? In an insightful assessment by a former top
DoD “space warrior”, published earlier this year, the answer seems to
be, “not much – if anything”.
Former
Brigadier General Simon (“Pete”) Worden, writing in the March/April
2006 issue of the pro-disarmament Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, directly
addressed the theme of a “war scare of sorts” that had recently erupted
when “the New York Times published a front-page article alleging the United
States was on the verge of authorizing a massive, secret space weapons development
program” involving orbital deployments.
“There’s
just one problem,” Worden continued: “A massive U.S. space weapons program
does not exist. Not only has there not been a space weapons push, but overall
U.S. military use of space is in sharp decline.” He provided examples of
year-by-year retreat from earlier grandiose posturing, adding that “most
of what might be called true offensive space weapons, such as space lasers, were
canceled long ago [and] the programs of the Missile Defense Agency for space-based
missile defenses, never large in recent years, have been marginalized by Congress
and Pentagon leadership.”
This
trend makes sense, he explained, because post-9/11, the dominant threats have
shifted dramatically, while “for the time being, a rapid rise of technological
adversaries does not appear imminent.” Lastly, Worden addressed some well-deserved
zingers at Pentagon mismanagement of earlier space programs that are severely
over budget, opining that military space managers “are incapable of delivering
any space capability, let alone a space weapon.”
“A
U.S. push to develop space weapons is highly unlikely in the foreseeable future,”
Worden concluded. Dispassionate analyses by other, independent institutes corroborate
Worden’s thesis: whatever funding has been made available to research and
demonstration projects has been small change compared to the surveillance projects
that continue to dominate US military space spending.
Eisendrath,
by email, insisted to me that such projects exist and are moving towards deployment.
His book, due out from New Press in February, “documents a wide range of
weapon development programs… some with some fairly close testing dates,”
he wrote.
Paper
shields in space
The
most significant difference between the new Bush document and the one it superseded
has to do with its attitude towards international treaties. For Clinton, international
treaties to restrict undesirable actions in space—such as interfering with
another country’s satellites—were desirable. For the current document,
such treaties “get no respect”. They are not entirely ruled out, but
they will be considered only if they do not constrain US security activities.
This
is a legitimate point for disagreement and debate. But unspoken assumptions and
overlooked precedents must also be examined. Considering the 20th century’s
experience with the effectiveness of arms control treaties (or modern attempts
to rein in nuclear weapons programs in Iran, North Korea, and elsewhere), at least
some skepticism of how thoroughly a nation can rely on them for its own security
seems justified. And when one examines the history of weapons in space, the credibility
of such a “paper security” strategy becomes even more strained.
Craig
Eisendrath, who was ABC’s interviewee on space weapons issues in their most
recent website story and who graciously entered into a candid exchange of emails
with me, expressed views which may contribute to illustrating potential problems
with space weapons treaties.
Eisendrath
declared to ABC that, to the best of his knowledge, there is no advantage to putting
nuclear bombs in orbit. “The effects of most of these weapons can be gotten
through ground-based weaponry at a fraction of the cost,” he assured ABC
News.
To
some degree, this is a strawman, since there don’t seem to be any genuine
suggestions that the US actually do it, even though the Putin’s November
8th statement suggests the Russians do worry about it. But that Russian worry
may reflect subconscious mirror-imaging, because in the history of the Space Race,
there has indeed been one known program to place nuclear weapons in orbit—and
it was a Soviet program.
So
that concept, however rare, does provide further illumination of the current debate.
In the very same days that Eisendrath was working on the 1967 Outer Space Treaty—the
one that outlawed placing weapons of mass destruction in orbit—the USSR was
flight testing a space weapon designed to do exactly that.
Eisendrath’s
team, he has emailed me, was fully aware of that project. “It was, as you
know, deployed in 1968,” he wrote, “but it was possible to have such
weapons under the 1967 Treaty without the warheads.” He did admit that was
“one of the defects of the treaty”: that “it would take little
to put them in.” He attributed this defect to “some distraction because
of the Viet Nam War,” thus laying the blame on the United States for the
USSR’s ability to circumvent the clear intent (but not the letter, until
too late to call a lawyer) of the treaty.
The
Soviet tests, running from late 1966 into the late 1960’s, involved launching
a military missile from Kazakhstan to place a nuclear bomb in a very low orbit
around Earth. Hugging the curvature of the planet, the warhead could approach
much closer to its target before being picked up on radar. It then fired a braking
rocket to drop out of orbit and hit the target.
US
officials called this system the “Fractional Orbit Bombardment System”,
or FOBS. Moscow camouflaged the orbital launches as part of their Kosmos science
satellite series for peaceful space exploration. However, they deployed several
dozen such missiles at the Baykonur space center, and in a Red Square parade showed
off mockups of missiles that, they claimed, could attack the enemy “along
orbital trajectories”.
When
is a treaty violation not a treaty violation?
Space
lawyers, faced with a system obviously built to break the Outer Space Treaty,
went through twisted orbits of technicalities to persuade themselves the Soviet
nuclear orbital weapon was not a violation of the treaty banning nuclear orbital
weapons. They pointed out that the real warheads wouldn’t actually be put
into orbit until the moment the USSR chose to make its surprise attack—and
treaties are null and void in such circumstances. They argued that since the attack
plan did not complete a full orbit, it didn’t really count as being in orbit
(but, by that standard, neither had Yuri Gagarin been in orbit, since his Vostok
capsule landed west of his eastwards take-off path). They made every excuse in
the space book for the USSR, which meanwhile totally ignored the fuss and kept
a few dozen such launchers on combat alert into the 1980’s.
But
if the anti-weapons treaty Eisendruth (and many others) are most proud of really
couldn’t even stop the orbiting of a Soviet nuclear weapon whenever the Soviet
Union decided to actually do it, how good was such paper for the defense of the
United States today?
Nor
were the anti-space-weapons treaty advocates anywhere to be seen in the face of
other Russian orbital weapons: hardware built to go into space and operate there,
not just merely fly up and down on earth-launched vertical sorties. The Russians
built an orbital anti-satellite system that apologists pooh-poohed as “unreliable”.
The Russians put an air-to-air cannon on a manned spacecraft in order to kill
astronauts who got too close—not a peep from the “weapons-free space”
crowd. In 1987 the USSR launched the 80-ton Skif-DM, what was to be the first
in a series of “space battle stations” to carry a 1-megawatt carbon-dioxide
laser into orbit for anti-missile and anti-satellite tests, while preparing the
Kaskad cruisers to be armed with space-to-space missiles tested on Progress missions—no
objections ever recorded from keep-space-free-of-weapons advocates.
This
is not to argue the point that the US should build similar orbital weapons because
the Russians did (and the US never did). That would have been neither sensible
nor excusable, although a common argument today is that the US deployment of what
might be interpreted (or misinterpreted) as a space weapon is carte blanche for
other countries to guiltlessly follow suit.
However,
this true history of orbital weapons—a history that current Russian officials
continue to dissemble about—should allow a cold-blooded calculation of the
effectiveness (or lack thereof) of space arms control treaties in the past and
on the even-handedness of “peace-in-space” groups that dominate the
Western news media, and explain why some specialists retain a strong skepticism
that worthwhile treaties can be enforced in the future.
What
the meaning of the word “is” is
The
FOBS apparently evaded legal concerns because nobody could agree, then or now,
what it actually meant to be “in orbit” (just as space lawyers, fifty
years into the Space Age, have not even defined the boundary of “space”
as opposed to flight in Earth’s atmosphere).
Hence
it is not reassuring that in the recent Russian/Chinese working paper (CD/1779)
where they propose banning space weapons, they discuss definitions of concepts
like “Outer Space” or even “Space Weapons,” but they argue
that a treaty might not really need specific definitions—for the reason that
it is so difficult to reach agreement on them. They advocate, in other words,
a treaty that the signatories do not even agree on the meaning of.
A
related issue was addressed in my 1999 book, Space Power Theory, where I wrote
the following:
