The Final Frontier
So, after years of trying, the U.S. military finally had a successful real world test of its anti-ballistic missile defense systems.
The Pentagon claims that a three-stage missile launched from the USS Lake Erie off the coast of Hawaii on Wednesday successfully destroyed a wayward U.S. spy satellite.
The official story is that the satellite was loaded with 1,000 pounds of a dangerous chemical, hydrazine, in its fuel tank and needed to be destroyed to prevent harm to others.
The rest of the world isn’t buying the explanation. They see it as a thinly-disguised attempt by the Pentagon to test an anti-satellite weapon and another example of how the United States is trying to seek military dominance in space.
It’s hard to argue with that line of reasoning. When China used similar technology last year to shoot down one of its communications satellites, it was criticized by the Bush administration. Now, China has turned the tables and is criticizing the Bush administration for doing the same thing.
China and Russia have long sought an agreement with the United States to restrict the militarization of space. But the United States has claimed the right to protect its commercial and military satellites. It has refused to consider any new treaties to limit development of weapons for use in outer space. Research has been underway for years by the Pentagon on a number of space weapons designed to disable or destroy satellites.
A 1967 United Nations treaty bans weapons of mass destruction from space, but the Bush administration has not shown that it is totally committed to that pact. There have been many more indications that it is committed to deploying more space weapons. Just last week, the administration rejected a draft treaty presented at the U.N. Conference of Disarmament which would ban space weapons and prohibit attacking satellites from the ground or space.
In 2002, the United States withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty so it could deploy a missile defense shield. And in 2005, a commission led by then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld concluded that there is no current treaty or agreement to stop the United States from “placing or using weapons in space, applying force from space to Earth, or conducting military operations in and through space.”
Given the dominance of the United States in space, fears of a “space Pearl Harbor,” as Rumsfeld’s commission put it, are overblown. And, since almost every policy decision in the Bush administration comes down to who will profit from it, seven of the 13 members of Rumsfeld’s commission had ties to aerospace companies that would make a lot of money if a major space weapons program came to fruition.
Just because the United States has the capability to militarily dominate space doesn’t mean we should do it. If the United States intends to develop the capability to disable or destroy another nation’s satellites, other nations — particularly Russia and China — will be encouraged to the same.
For years, space has been the place for international cooperation rather than confrontation. Continuing that cooperation means a weapons-free space environment.
It is in the best interest of our nation to work with other nations to establish an agreement that would include a ban on flight testing or deployment of space weapons, minimizing space debris and mandating international cooperation on satellite traffic management. The cost of not doing this is risking an all-out war in the heavens that no one will win.
© 2008 The Reformer
Of course there will be winners — the aerospace companies themselves — the source and beneficiaries of this obscene and self-destructive investment in perpetual war.
except that corporations are not people, they are machines in essence. Once the humans are all gone, our “offspring” and enemy the corporation will be gone as well. They can’t exist without us. But we can exist witout them–and, it seems, ONLY without them.
“the U.S. military finally had a successful real world test of its anti-ballistic missile defense systems.”
Wow, what a huge sucess… now if they can just convinced Russia, China, Pakistan ,India, France, UK , Iran and North Korea to put US tracking devices in all their missles, like were on the satelite, we have it made.
Firing a $30MM to $70MM (I’ve heard different numbers)
missile to shoot down a $1,000,000,000 non-functioning satellite is a pretty expensive “test.” We did not design this episode as a test, but we did succeed in preventing something super-secret from falling down just any ole place into just any ole lap. Signaling the Russians and Chinese we can do such a thing is not the “provocation” they claim. It’s just another chapter in spy vs. spy vs. spy vs. spy.
This is another step of the Beast of militarism.
It sees enemies everywhere.
It demands more money, more lives, more obedience, more power.
More and more, more and more. It is insatiable.
There is no negotiation, there is no compromise.
There is only supremacy and dominance.
No one can stand up to the Beast.
It will devour us.
All in the cause of saving us, of course.
I suspect this intercept was done at low speed, i.e. the missile came from behind to destroy the satellite. That would have made it very easy, something which could have been done many years ago.
There ought to be a law that before mankind spends so much as a penny to launch himself into any permanent presence in outer space or on any other celestial body, that he straighten out the mess he has made on the earth.
I am not oppossed to weather or comunications satellite systems, observaties (yea Hubble!) or global positioning satellites–just permanent manned space platforms of any kind above the earth or anywhere else extra-terrestial.
Why should humanity’s presence out there be allowed to repeat the same mistakes it has made down here?
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“President George W. Bush is proposing a nearly $380 billion Pentagon budget that helps overhaul Americas military might, including strengthening U.S. capabilities in space.”
“Hardening U.S. space systems and building capabilities to defend our space assets could dissuade adversaries from developing and using small killer satellites to attack and cripple U.S. satellite networks. New earth-penetrating and thermobaric weapons could make obsolete the deep underground facilities where today terrorists hide and terrorist states conceal their weapons of mass destruction capabilities,” Rumsfeld said.
IOW, too late folks - We The People love us our full spectrum dominance. Space nukes are right around the corner…
The military is no longer functioning in defense of Americans. It is indirectly killing them by demanding a defense budget so large that it leaves fifty million Americans without health insurance. They are killing the people they are supposed to defend.
Daniel David,
Expensive tests are not a problem. The “defense” companies and their allies in Washington long ago learned how to game the system so that their funds are virtually unlimited, i.e. from the taxpayers. And when the taxpayers start to feel the squeeze, there will be plenty of school lunches and other “unnecessary” items to cut, and let’s not forget the possibility of tapping into the money “wasted” on providing Social Security and Medicare payments.
U.S. military domination of space was spelled out in the PNAC document. If you’ve read that doc you’ll see that duck isn’t quite as lame as we’d hoped. A fully owned and controlled media does nothing to jostle the determination of this bunch to materialize as much of the PNAC paranoia as possible.
The unspoken and unwritten lead-in to “Strategies For Rebuilding America’s Defenses” goes something like this: “As we proclaim the inevitable rightness of the New American Century we aren’t squimish that this period rests primarily on overwhelming use of military might.”
Vince Lawrence is right. Everyone should read “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” and other documents on the website of the Project for the New American Century. It will soon become clear that these neoconmen (Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Libby, Abrahms, Bolton, Khalilzad, and others currently or formerly in the Cheney-Bush junta) believe that the USA is destined to rule the entire planet plus outer space! They intend to accomplish–no, to finish accomplishing this goal–by putting nuclear and other weapons in orbit, by having satellites that can shoot down other satellites, by taking complete control of cyberspace, etc. This goal apparently does not seem unrealistic to them, perhaps because the USA already has military bases in 136 of the appx. 197 independent countries in the world.
Anyway, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” can be found here (~90 page pdf):
http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf
If you do bring up this document, please search on the words “Pax Americana”, “cyberspace”, and “Pearl Harbor” (separate searches, that is).
Happy reading!
MIC’s Marks
Almighty MIC
The trillion dollar DOW tick
Is taking from us all
Who is this MIC
That’s got to sell the biggest stick?
Who is this MIC
That’s always on the take?
Ya if we work we work for MIC
For MIC takes R and D for free
And makes a bigger stick
And calls it patriots flee
Or infinite glee
Gotta have those sticks say nation’s hoods
So MIC gotta make still bigger sticks
We pay and pay and pay and pay
While better sticks hold sway
So soon to make the world go away.
Oh go away……..
Who is this MIC
Who is this MIC
Who is this MIC
MIC’s work has shown up on tubes that replay
MIC’s marksmanship that’s been upped
Stealth sticks from MICs fry marks in record numbers
While the DOW ticks up and up and up
For MIC’s death tick is plunder
We the mark … yah Gates chill us out
For we’re the mark
We the MIC mark
We all are the MIC marks
How hard is it to hit a target that has a damn homing beacon on it?