From: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu (Rich Winkel)
Subject: Turning SDI into the Space Domination Initiative
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: PACH
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1992 20:44:54 GMT

          Star Wars:  Turning the Strategic Defense Initiative
                  into the Space Domination Initiative

                    by Jeffrey Klein and Dan Stober

     Reprinted with permission from In These Times, Sept. 30 - Oct.13
                     [Subscription info at bottom]

A good place to comprehend how the U.S. plans to fight 21st-century wars
is beneath a mountain in Colorado.  A 1,400-foot tunnel bored through
Cheyenne Mountain leads to an underground village of spring-mounted
buildings built to sway in a nuclear attack.  These headquarters of
the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) are webbed to the
nearby Falcon Air Force Base, the first operational center for "star
wars."

Their combined computers, crunching data from radar installations,
ground-based telescopes and satellites 22,300 miles above Earth, offer
a real-time view of all missile launches and bomber runs around the
world, and everything orbiting the planet, down to space junk the size
of a softball.

A good part of the most recent war was fought from here.  The hot
exhaust flames of Saddam Hussein's Scud missiles were caught by
satellite sensors, and the news was beamed to computer screens inside
this mountain, here the targets were calculated instantaneously and
warnings flashed via space back to Saudi Arabia or Israel.

Space gave the U.S. forces every conceivable advantage in the Gulf War.
Satellites told commanders exactly where their own troops were and
helped pick targets on the other side.  Allied communications were
handled by satellites, while Saddam's forces lost their ground-based
communications early in the bombing.  The U.S. had an advantage even in
predicting the weather, a key element in the aerial campaign.  In short,
U.S. troops saw everything, and Irag was left deaf, dumb and blind in
what the Air Force calls the "first space war.

The pentagon wants the next war to be controlled and all but decided
with weapons in the "high ground" of space, directed from
electronic-control rooms in places like Cheyenne Mountain.

With the realization that control of space leads to worldwide military
superiority comes the further realization that the first country to
flood Earth's orbital lanes with weaponry may be able to prevent anyone
else from doing the same.

Wouldn't the U.S. be smart to secure dominance while it has no
competitors, while the former Soviet Union is on the ropes and the next
enemy--whoever that might be--hasn't started building up?

The answer from the leading edge of the defense establishment is a
resounding yes.  The technological research is already underway to
convert the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), the "star wars"
anti-missile program, from a supposedly defensive system into a web of
expensive, Earth-circling offensive weapons.

This militarization of space would represent a quantum leap in weaponry
similar to the invention of the nuclear weapon and the Intercontinental
Ballistic Missle.  And yet, there's been little discussion in Congress
or elsewhere of the tremendous financial costs, the technical problems
or the odds that generating a space-based arms race may leave the
world a more dangerous place than it is now.

"You cannot start shooting down satellites.  What kind of law-abiding
country are we? asks Kosta Tsipis, a Massachusetts Institute of
Technology physicist and SDI expert.  "We don't want to knock down
civilian satellites.  We don't want somebody else shooting down ours."

But the confidence that we can police the world without retaliation was
reflected earlier in the year in a leaked Bush administration defense
planning document for 1994-1999.  The draft proposed that potential
competitors "be deterred from even aspiring to a larger regional or
global role" by keeping them inside U.S.-dominated security alliances.

A space blockade would effectively ring the planet with barbed wire,
making the whole world a security zone.  Errant countries would be
punished from the sky, with American troops entering the fray only to
mop-up.

Behind this movement are many of the same men and organizations
responsible for launching "star wars" a decade ago.

They include Edward Teller, co-inventor of the hydrogen bomb, adviser to
presidents and currently Cold Warrior without a cause; Lowell Wood,
Teller's protege and technological guru at Lawrence Livermore
Laboratory; Daniel Graham, the space-obsessed retired Air Force general
who runs the lobbying and research group High Frontier; and the Her-
itage Foundation, the conservative think tank that has been highly
influential in the Reagan-Bush era.

BRILLIANT PLANS

To learn more about the clandestine shifts taking place in SDI, we went
to the annual gathering of the U.S.  Space Foundation, in the shadow of
NORAD's Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado Springs.

In formal speeches in the convention center auditorium, the generals
and admirals talked enthusiastically about using space for military
missions.  In the hallways and in the exhibit center, around the
rocket-and-satellite booths of the defense contractors, the profes-
sionals revealed what was already underway.

The reconfiguration of SDI has already begun in the national labs and
the workshops of defense organizations in an ad hoc fashion.  The new
version is a war-fighting machine capable of dominating battlefields and
threatening a space blockade.  It will be built on Brilliant Pebbles
and Brilliant Eyes, the satellites with the odd names that are at the
heart of the Bush administration's plans for SDI.

The official anti-missile scheme calls for a constellation of
surveillance satellites (Brilliant Eyes), watching for fiery rocket
plumes, the telltale indicator of an enemy launch.  In a lower orbit, a
larger constellation of human-sized interceptors (Brilliant Pebbles)
wait for the signal, then attack the missiles and destroy them.

In the unofficial version, much of which has been invented at Livermore,
the Eyes will be equipped with radars, lasers, telescopes, antennae and
sensors to allow military commanders to see practically every square
foot of Earth--and analyze that information instantly.

The satellites would employ laser communications to pass the data from
one Eye to another, data circling the globe at the speed of light.  In
the heat of war, Eyes would beam consolidated pictures of the
battlefield directly to the on-scene commander below, in real time,
bypassing the delays and confusion of the Gulf war, when satellite
signals were first sent to the U.S. and then relayed to Saudi Arabia.

And the Pebbles?  They would serve multiple combat and blockade roles.

In a conventional war, according to a proposal being promoted around
the Pentagon by Lowell Wood, Brilliant Pebbles would be ordered to leave
their orbits and fly downward at high speed to hit targets on the sur-
face of the planet with great precision.

"Lowell has argued that you could use these things to attack tanks,
airplanes, anything else," says a Lawrence Livermore physicist.
"They like to say that around here, but not when they go to Congress."

In Colorado Springs, we asked Teller while he was walking to lunch one
day if Pebbles could be used to hit enemy command bunkers, a
high-priority target in the war with Iraq.  He stopped walking.

"Look," he said, in his commanding form of speech.  "Yes.  And in a war,
you would."

In a hallway at Colorado Springs, we also asked James Carlson, the SDI
office deputy for strategic defense, about Wood's claims.  "I know," he
sighed with a shrug.  "He calls them Endopebbles."  The prefix endo-
means Within"--in this case, within the Earth's atmosphere.

Could Endopebbles be what is code-named Brilliant Fingers, one of the
many "black budget" programs on which Wood is working?  The Pentagon
has traditionally hidden its most controversial research and development
projects in its secret budget.  "Think of the human anatomy," confides a
Lawrence Livermore physicist.  "For every anatomical part, there's a
'Brilliant' technology.  "Star wars" scientists are also researching,
for example, tiny sensors, disguised to look like rocks, that would be
dropped in large numbers over the battlefield.  They would then, their
inventors promise, transmit data to satellites.

But these endoweapons may be fringe projects.  Threatening enemy
satellites would seem to be Pebbles' main goal.

In their blockade role, Pebbles would be transformed into enforcement
battleships, poised to destroy any missile attempting to run the
blockade and put a satellite in orbit.

HIGH FRONTIER DIRECTOR

Daniel Graham is blunt.  Standing in the exhibit area near a full-scale
model of a Pebble, he said:  "What Brilliant Pebbles would give you is
control of access to space.  You can say, 'You can come up here if
you're on a peaceful mission, but you can't come up if you're going to
do something nasty.'"  Pebbles would provide, Graham explained, "the
kind of control that the British once had on the high seas."  The
British, of course, used that control not only to defend that homeland
but also to create an empire.

Pebbles, according to some experts in Colorado Springs, would make
ideal blockade ships.  Their original mission, after all, was to shoot
down missiles--and knocking down a single missile attempting to launch,
for example, a North Korean spy satellite would be light years easier
than stopping a barrage of Russian submarine-launched missiles.

A senior executive with a defense contractor, a manager with a long
history of involvement with U.S. space policy, said the use of
Brilliant Pebbles for space-blockade purposes would be "profound," and
that such a use "had been discussed in Secretary of Defense Dick
Cheney's office."

Equally important is the role of Pebbles as anti-satellite weapons, or
ASATs, to knock out satellites already in orbit.  Having the ability to
eliminate any satellite, whether military or commercial (the difference
between the two is diminishing), would provide the U.S. with a drastic
military advantage in war and a huge bully stick in peacetime.

Without satellites, potential adversaries would be as much in the dark
as Saddam's forces were during the Gulf War.  Without space systems,
Saddam was blind.  With them, noted Gen.  Kutyna, "he would have seen
Schwarzkopf's left hook, his Hail Mary maneuver [into Iraq], and allied
lives would have been lost."

We asked Kutyna about Brilliant Pebbles as an ASAT weapon.  Pebbles were
not "optimized" for that task, he said, but added, "that technology,
however, could be applicable.  So a spinoff of a Brilliant Pebble could
be developed that could become an ASAT weapon."

Already in orbit, with its own propulsion and guidance system, a Pebble
could easily steer itself into the path of the satellite of another
nation.  Daniel Graham described this ASAT ability as "the great
unspoken" of the SDI program.

Although the U.S. military has long wanted ASAT weapons, Congress has
denied them, fearing an expensive arms race in space.  But the generals
have not given up.

"I still have an ASAT very high on my priority list," Kutyna said in
Colorado Springs.

"Several of the things that SDI is doing are applicable to the broader
purpose of space control," concludes Baker Spring, a "star wars"
advocate at the Heritage Foundation.

A few short years ago, the warrior's dream of dominating space would
have been all but impossible, for one very simple reason:  The U.S.
shared military dominance of the planet with the Soviet Union.  Treaties
were in place to block a costly and dangerous space arms race, and each
side closely monitored the other's progress.

In his 1983 "star wars" speech, President Reagan offered to share with
the Soviets a leak-proof umbrella that would render nuclear weapons
obsolete.  Today, the former Soviets still being invited to come in
under our umbrella not as partners in a missile-proof world but as
blue-collar workers helping us to arm the heavens.  They'd do the heavy
lifting.

The day we visited with Edward Teller in his office at the Hoover
Institution, he said his chief geopolitical worry was finding employment
for his former counterparts, the Russian defense scientists.

Teller, worried about the Russians?  It turned out that for many months
he'd been lobbying the Bush administration to buy the SS-18s, the big
missiles of the Soviet Union, and use them to launch Brilliant Pebbles,
which currently are stranded without a ride.

"This might be nonsense," he said later, in that way that telegraphs
that he is completely serious.  "Why not transform them ... for the
delivery of these low-flying satellites?  In this way, we can have them
in two years rather than three or four."

Recently, Henry Cooper, head of the SDI program, went public with the
same proposal.

The Russian scientists could use the work, and their government could
use the money.  But the use of those SS-18s to launch Brilliant Pebbles
would violate the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, which has governed
nuclear relations between the superpowers for decades.

Because the treaty obstructs the star warriors' way at every step, the
Bush administration is determined to get out of it.

So bothersome is the ABM treaty that President Bush is personally
pushing Boris Yeltsin to yield.  Teller's missile purchases would be a
way of buying the Russians out of the treaty.  On the other hand, U.S.
military contractors don't want competition in the launch-vehicle
business.  Some advisers suggest that the Russians can simply be
silenced with foreign aid.

"If the Russians want billions in economic assistance, we should at
least ask for some relief from the ABM treaty, and then we could move
forward," argues Jim Hackett, a policy executive at Titan Systems in San
Diego and a member of Bush's Arms Control Advisory Board.

When the public marketing of space control finally begins, the main
selling point will doubtless be the proliferation of missile tech-
nology and nuclear weapons in the Third World countries, an ironic
pitch, since the Bush and Reagan administrations have done little to
curtail this proliferation.

Space domination is already being testmarketed with hard and soft
sells.

The Heritage Foundation, Washington's premier conservative think tank,
is proposing the hard sell:  The U.S. should simply seize control of
space preemptively.  We should warn other countries that they have no
guaranteed right of access to space.

"If Third World leaders realize that the U.S. and its allies will
destroy their satellites or render them useless in case of war, they
will be less likely to make the investment in the first place," says a
Heritage paper by Baker Spring published in May.

Space technology is becoming the "equalizer" that makes small countries
a military danger to larger ones, and something must be done.  "The
primary obstacle in the effort to control space technology is the
presumption in the international community that all countries are
entitled to access to space," the report concludes, adding, almost
indignantly:  "This principle even is embodied in a treaty."

"KEEP-OUT" ZONES

The Heritage Foundation backgrounder proposes that the U.S. opt out of
this treaty--the 1967 U.N.  Treaty on Outer Space.  To mollify
international concerns a bit, small countries with a need for civilian
communications satellites would be allowed to purchase launch services
from the U.S.  But since any satellite is suspect in wartime, the U.S.,
the backgrounder says, should quickly develop a "capability to enforce a
military 'keep-out' zone in space over a battle area."

In the same vein, Gen.  Donald Hard, director of space programs for the
Air Force, wistfully noted in a speech to the National Space Club in
June that there was no technical reason why the U.S. could not have
weapons in space.  "It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out
that you can crater an enemy runway with a space-based offensive weapon,
but first you had better figure out how to get through that policy
debate in Congress to get agreement to go ahead and shoot those kinds of
technologies."

Astronomer Carl Sagan is repelled by the prospect of space keep-out
zones, endoweapons and imperial grabs.  "There is nothing more
appropriate than exploring and utilizing space on behalf of the human
species and not on behalf of whichever nation was lucky enough by
historical circumstances to get to space first."

Sagan grants that grabs have been "the historic practice of the human
species.  You either copy the guys with leading weaponry or you're
inundated by them.  Eventually, the whole planet is filled with the
military culture of the most technically fearsome society.  That works
fine up to the point that world-transforming technologies are
available.  At that point, the conquistadors have to be very careful,
because their weaponry could redound to destroy them."

The star warriors are aware that peaceful global perspectives are in
vogue.  Publicly taking the soft-sell tack, Teller and Wood are pro-
moting the civilian uses of a fleet of Brilliant Eyes.  The Eyes, they
say, could be used to study crops, spot fires, give a quick first glance
at disaster areas, chart forest patterns, analyze clouds and the
atmosphere (with orbiting lasers), monitor global warming and trans-
form weather forecasting from voodoo into a science.

This attempt to broaden SDI's base of support is backed by market
research.  According to a poll released in March by Rockwell Inter-
national Corp., deployment of satellites to monitor the Earth's
environment is by far the favorite space program of American voters.

Still, there remains an enormous political hurdle before a full-scale
space weapons system wins public backing.  It is the absence of what
Air Force Lt.  Gen.  Thomas Moorman Jr. called "an acceptable threat,"
now that the Cold War is over.

With no credible enemies on the horizon, and the historical need to
rationalize military buildups as defensive in nature, some star warriors
are advocating the use of space weapons to protect our allies against
enemy missile attacks in foreign theaters.

Even with an ostensibly defensive armada, the U.S. may be tempted to
intervene all around the globe.  Consider the argument put forth by
James Carlson, the SDI office deputy for strategic defense, in support
of anti-ballistic missiles.

Suppose, he suggested, that the U.S. was in a limited conflict with a
future Saddam, instituting a trade embargo against him and bombing his
factories.  What if Saddam then said, "I have a secret nuclear weapon on
a missile, and if you don't lift your trade embargo and stop bombing our
factories, I'll launch it!"  With an SDI system in place to stop this
missile, Carlson said, we could call his bluff.  Carlson's example is
telling.  In it, the U.S. has already inflicted an embargo and bombed a
foreign country.  ABMs would allow us to continue these actions with
impunity.  And, of course, Carlson's system is not primarily defensive;
the ABMs are cogs in a war machine.

Other star warriors are looking at renascent empires for grand
acceptable threats to match our grand military ambitions.

"I think the country most likely to challenge American control of
access to space is the Japanese, says Graham, the founder of High
Frontier.  "Star wars" would thus become another Great White Fleet,
steaming over to Tokyo to frighten the Japanese once again.

Meanwhile, Edward Teller is saying that we must prepare for an
inevitable military challenge from a reunited Germany.

In the presence or absence of an enemy, none of the plans to dominate
space is guaranteed to work.  There are voluminous technical
difficulties; hardly anything has actually been tested in space, and
much of that has failed.  In fact, almost 10 years after Reagan's
speech, the V.S. has spent at least $29 billion on one of the largest
research and development projects in the nation's history, with vir-
tually nothing to show.  There is no missile shield of any kind.  The
overall blueprint has changed almost annually, while entire projects
have simply been abandoned.

"Star wars has failed ... it is a fraud," concludes Aldric Saucier
with sadness and anger.  The highest-ranking member of the "star wars"
bureaucracy to break ranks, Saucier says the entire SDI program has
become little more than a pipeline of cash to defense contractors, "like
a big Toys R Us."

The missile tests of Bebbles and other SDI interceptors have been, in
essence, rigged, Saucier claims.  Far from having to find a speeding
target in space and destroy it under realistic conditions, the
interceptors have been guided right to their targets, he says.  And even
then, some of them have missed.

The most recent miss was a June 19 warhead interception experiment,
one of three admitted failures in 1992 alone.  SDI has also been plagued
by launch explosions, forced destructions of off-course rockets,
premature detonations and malfunctioning sensors and satellites.  In
contrast to the hoopla surrounding space shuttle delays, these failures
have received notice only in the military trade press.

Despite SDI's lack of technical success an frequent predictions of its
demise in Congress, the president has pressed aggressively ahead each
year with a new round of funding The criticism that SDI's shield is full
of hole hasn't been taken too seriously by its proponents, because the
real purpose of "star wars is to rule space.  Pentagon officials know
that although a defensive team system must be almost perfect--one
mistake could mean a city obliterated by a hydrogen bomb--an offensive
system does not have to reach such high standards.  If you miss your
target the first time, you simply take another shot.

Similarly, a price tag $1 trillion, which i what Rep.  Leon Panetta
(D-CA), the head a the House Budget Committee, says a completed SDI
would ultimately cost, doesn't seen too high to the military if the
prize might b control of space.

Militarizing space, of course, means further pollution of space.  Before
Sputnik was launched, there were no man-made object circling the globe.
Now there are millions, i you count the fingernail-size flecks of pain
and other material from old spacecraft that have exploded or collided
with each other Traveling at 17,000 miles per hour, the smallest piece
of space junk can have deadly consequences for whatever it strikes.
Once we begin testing ASATs, we will generate more debris, which will
increase the probability of accidental collisions.

Then there are intentional collisions.  Even if the U.S. establishes a
dominant presence, other nations may respond with variations of Saddam's
torched-oil-wells strategy.  They may try to counteract a space blockade
by exploding nuclear weapons in space or littering the orbital lanes
with so much fast-moving shrapnel that nothing can survive there.

The Pentagon views such confrontations with equanimity, as business as
usual.  To the military mind, such a scenario paradoxically proves that
the U.S. needs to secure the high ground before the crazies gain a
foothold.

Richard Garwin, an IBM fellow and longtime defense consultant to the
U.S. government, warns that we can become the crazies. b "One really
has to watch out for these harebrained schemes that will convert the
U.S. into a benevolent dictator that will run the entire world for the
overall benefit of humankind as we see it.  We have to have a reasonable
sharing of power with other people because otherwise we will be
deposed from that king-of-the-heap position."

Carl Sagan agrees that our treaty-busting attempts to rule space are
likely to earn us the hatred of developing countries.  "As in biological
evolution, every measure has a countermeasure.  If, in fact, the U.S.
Iooks to be developing a credible threat, there would be a really
strong impetus for the French, the Japanese, the Chinese, the European
Community as a whole, the former Soviets to now develop comparable
capabilities of their own."

Gen.  Kutyna is clearly expecting some reaction.  "Whatever the enemy
space systems will be ... we'll develop countermeasures," he said.

And thus the space arms race will be on, with no convincing argument
that anyone will be the safer for it.

--------

Dan Stober is a San Jose Mercury News staff writer.

Jeffrey Klein is the new editor of Mother Jones.

--------
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