Do We Really Need Space Weapons?

tcd004 writes "The U.S. military is developing technology to disable, jam, and even destroy enemy satellites. But are space weapons necessary? No, says Michael Krepon, director of the Stimson Center's Space Security Project. He argues that developing space weapons is a surefire way to launch a new space weapon race.

Comments

Re:The PNAC's "Rebuilding America's Defenses"

[alfredo]

spells it out nicely. Members/contributors of the PNAC include Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush, Karl Rove, David Wurmer, and Scooter Libby.

The above document spells out the blueprint for world dominance, starting with seizing the oil in Iraq. It goes on and pushes for space warfare. Ugly document written by ugly people.

Re:Against treaties

[Necron69]

Perhaps you seem to forget (or are ignorant of the fact) that the United States formally withdrew from the ABM treaty in 2002. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-ballistic_missil e_treaty> for reference.

The ABM treaty is no longer in effect and is irrelevant to this discussion. There are no legal obligations preventing the US from deploying space weapons. It is solely a technical and policy and/or moral decision.

- Necron69

Re:Haven't you heard?

[whopis]

When the US first signed this particularly treaty, a clause was placed there to allow either side to withdraw from it so long as they gave six months notice.

So, to begin with, the notion that the treaty was broken is false. There was an exit clause placed in the treaty and that clause was properly executed.

Of course, that doesn't change the fact that we decided to pull out of the treaty. However, in regards to your question of "So why did the US sign them in the first place?" and whether or not such treaties are in our self interest... it appears obvious that the leaders that first signed them thought that it would be likely that either side might in the future decide that the treaty should no longer apply. They put that clause in there after all.

I'm not trying to debate the point of whether or not it is a good treaty with respect to our self interest. Frankly, I really don't know. Personally I feel that ABMs are only likely to increase the desire of potential enemies to build up the number of weapons they have capable of reaching us. And it is a particularly bad solution when the cost of an ABM weapon is greater than the cost of the BM it is designed to counter. However, this all comes from my rather limited viewpoint.

But as to the notion of the U.S. breaking the treaty, or whether or not the leaders who signed it thought it was in our best interest to be permanently constrained by such a treaty... it is pretty clear that it was not broken, and the leaders who signed it provided an exit clause.

Re:Perhaps space is where Iraq keeps the WMDs

[Rei]

The WMDs, which clearly did exist (we even have records he used them) don't need airholes, and are easier to hide harder to find

1) Pro-war hawk, Bush appointee, former devout WMD believer, and head of the WMD search David Kay acknowleges that no such weapons existed at the time of the invasion. The search teams are no longer operating.

2) The inspections teams were on the same track; the IAEA was reportedly close to declaring Iraq nuclear-free, while UNMOVIC was working on verifying chemical weapon destruction quantities based on the amount of residual chemicals in the destruction zones. The residuals were evident, but the quantity of source material was unknown. Both have now stated that they believe, just like Kay, that there were not WMDs in Iraq. In short, every inspection team sent to Iraq has reached that same conclusion.

3) The highest profile Iraqi defector in history, Hussein Kamel (Saddam's son-in-law), in addition to giving a bunch of humiliating information on Iraq that he later got assassinated for (exposing Iraq's biological warfare program and leading them to the information, pointing out that UNSCOM's head's personal translator was a double agent, etc), informed the teams that Iraq *had* destroyed its chemical and biological agents in order to try and get the embargo lifted and limit inspection team knowlege of how much their scientists knew.

Saddam's refusal to cooperate with inspections

The IAEA and UNMOVIC heads themselves described good cooperation from the Iraqi government. Blix - the more harsh of the two organization heads - stated that "Iraq wwas guilty of only small infractions". Most of the Iraqi complaints were of the US spying to gather information for war, which turned out to be true. And lets not forget the peace initiatives.

active promotion of terrorism

The closest thing Iraq did to active promotion of terrorism was giving money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers to compensate for Israel's policy of destroying the families' homes. Of course, Saudi Arabia did the exact same thing. Beyond that, there was very, very little that could be construed as supporting terrorism (a lot of misinformation went around on this subject: read up on Ansar al-Islam (more), Ramzi Yousef (mirror), Abu Nidal, and Salman Pak).

Now, if you want countries with clear, major ties to funding terrorists, you need to look at Iran and the United States.

Illegal attacks on peacekeepers

Oh, this is just rich. The No-Fly Zones were not UN-accepted; the French, Russians, and Chinese considered the joint US-British "No Fly" enforcement to be both illegal and counterproductive violation of Iraq's airspace. Then, before war began, we began bombing essentially at will to try and goad Iraq into attacking the US. The reason we were able to start the war with a ground assault was that our air assault began long before the war started.