War in Heaven: Stopping the Arms Race in Outer Space

By Helen Caldicott and Craig Eisendrath, The New Press. Posted June 12, 2007.

The following is an excerpt from War in Heaven: Stopping the Arms Race in Outer Space Before It's Too Late (New Press, 2007).

If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and reserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!

--"Nature," by Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1836

It's politically sensitive, but it's going to happen. Some people don't want to hear this and it sure isn't in vogue, but -- absolutely -- we're going to fight in space. We're going to fight from space and we're going to fight into space. That's why the U.S. has developed programs in directed energy and hit-to-kill mechanisms. We will engage terrestrial targets someday -- ships, airplanes, land targets -- from space. We will engage targets in space, from space.

--William R. Scott, "USSC Prepares for Future Combat Missions in Space," Aviation Week & Space Technology, Aug. 5, 1996

The Cold War is over, but many of us can remember the terror of living in that era. Tens of thousands of rockets were poised to strike the United States and the Soviet Union in less than an hour -- all armed with hydrogen bombs hundreds of times stronger than the bombs that had leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If war broke out, our countries would be seething wastes of radioactivity. Almost nothing would survive.

The Cold War began in 1945, immediately after World War II, and by 1958, both the United States and Russia had obtained hydrogen bombs of unbelievable destructive power. At the same time, both countries were developing intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) to speed the delivery of these satanic weapons to their targeted cities. Between them, the United States and the Soviet Union soon had the capacity to destroy the planet in a series of lightning strikes. During the 1960s, reports from the Rand Corp., a national security research institution, predicted between one and two hundred million dead in the first nuclear exchange. Not only would millions die, but the planet would be permanently polluted with radioactivity. Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union, said "Will the living envy the dead?"

The fact that the ICBMs were designed to exit the earth's atmosphere before raining death and destruction down on Moscow, St. Petersburg, New York and Washington, marked the first instance of the use of outer space for military purposes. And once this threshold had been crossed, military planners realized that space itself could be militarized -- satellites could be used to identify military targets on the other side of the world and accurately guide missiles to their targets. Before satellites were used in this way, it had not been feasible for the United States or the Soviet Union to fly over each other's territory under international law. The United States could not observe the Soviets, who might be developing a missile launching platform in some obscure area of Siberia, unless the United States flew over Soviet territory, a violation of national air space under international law and an act of war. Satellites allowed such observations to be made unobtrusively and legally for the purpose of either identifying targets or monitoring arms control agreements. This technology became even more important after the U-2 incident in 1960, when the American airplane pilot, Francis Gary Powers, was shot down while spying on the Soviet Union in a high-altitude plane.

The military planners had still other ideas for the military uses of outer space. Not only could missiles move through outer space and satellites spot targets and guide missiles, but weapons could be permanently placed in orbit outside the earth's atmosphere and then, on a signal from the earth, bombard bases and cities. Bombardment satellites, and satellites to knock out the satellites of other countries, looked like the weapons of future wars.

At the same time that military planners were dreaming of space wars, others were imagining a wide range of ways by which space could be used to benefit humankind. First on the seas, and then in the air, human beings had expanded their horizons, and had begun to create a unified planet. Outer space held the exciting promise of a further extension of the human endeavor -- a new frontier with the potential to benefit the entire species.

Scientific exploration held perhaps the greatest and most wonderful promise. Before satellite technology became available, the examination of the solar system, our own galaxy and the universe was limited to rather primitive observations made from the ground, because telescopic sightings were restricted by the fog of the atmosphere, which seriously compromised their clarity. Observations from satellites, by contrast, transcended the atmosphere, which opened up a whole new field of scientific endeavor. For the first time, we could observe the farther reaches of our planetary system with accuracy and begin to understand the composition of our galaxy and then of the universe as a whole. We began to comprehend the immensity of the universe that we inhabit -- 100 billion galaxies -- and to be able to speculate on the world's origins based on the direct evidence provided by satellite observations. The earthly restrictions on scientific research that limited findings in the 19th century and earlier decades of the 20th century were astonishingly superseded by the birth of a totally new field of astrophysics.

See more stories tagged with: foreign policy, weaponization of space, space wars

Helen Caldicott is the co-founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility, president of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute, and a Nobel Peace Prize nominee. She divides her time between Australia and Washington, D.C. Craig Eisendrath is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and author, most recently, of Bush League Diplomacy. He lives in Philadelphia.

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