By Karl Grossman In “Nukes in Space” Karl Grossman examines current U.S. plans to militarize and control space. Grossman is professor of journalism at the State University of New York College at Old Westbury. He is the author of The Wrong Stuff: The Space Program’s Nuclear Threat to Our Planet (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 2000), the just-released Weapons in Space (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001), and the video documentary Star Wars Returns (available from EnviroVideo at 1-800-ECO-TV46). This essay has been reprinted from the Spring 2001 issue of Food & Water Journal. Subscriptions are $25 per year for individuals, $40 for nonprofit organizations from PO Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834-9785. Website: www.foodandwater.org Email: info@foodandwater.org The United States is seeking to make space a new arena of war. U.S. military documents speak of having the United States “control space” and from space “dominate” Earth below. The U.S. military would also like to base weapons in space. Billions of tax dollars are being poured annually into U.S. preparations for space warfare. With the assumption of power by George W. Bush and Richard Cheney, an administration intimately linked to corporate and right-wing interests committed to expanding space military activities, Star Wars has gotten a huge boost. There is only a narrow window to stop the U.S. plans from going forward and preventing what inevitably would follow: other nations meeting the United States in kind and an arms race and ultimately war in space. And there is only a narrow window to strengthen the Outer Space Treaty, the landmark 1967 international treaty that sought to exclude war from space, that set aside space for “peaceful purposes.” “If the U.S. is allowed to move the arms race into space, there will be no return,” said Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, the Gainesville, Florida-based organization that is internationally challenging U.S. preparations to turn space into a war zone and striving at the grassroots level to keep space for peace. “We have this one chance,” Gagnon emphasized, “this one moment in history, to stop the weaponization of space from happening.” The U.S. space warfare plans are explicitly laid out in several documents, including the Vision for 2020 report of the U.S. Space Command. The U.S. Space Command “coordinates the use of Army, Naval and Air Force Space Forces” and was set up by the Pentagon to “help institutionalize the use of space.” The multicolored cover of Vision for 2020 depicts a laser weapon in space zapping a target below. (You can download this and similar documents from the U.S. Space Command website: www.spacecom.af.mil/usspace. The U.S. military is so bullish, so brazen about its plans for space war, it displays them on the Internet.) Vision for 2020 proclaims in words that slowly unscroll, as in the beginning of the Star Wars movies: “U.S. Space Command-dominating the space dimension of military operations to protect US interests and investment. Integrating Space Forces into warfighting capabilities across the full spectrum of conflict.” Vision for 2020, issued in 1996, compares the U.S. effort to control space and Earth below to how centuries ago “nations built navies to protect and enhance their commercial interests,” how the great empires of Europe ruled the waves and thus the world. And Vision for 2020 stresses the global economy. “The globalization of the world economy will also continue, with a widening between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots,”’ states the U.S. Space Command. The view is that by controlling space and Earth below, the United States will be able to keep those have-nots in line. The U.S. Space Command is readying itself to be “the enforcement arm for the global economy,” said Bill Sulzman, director of Citizens for Peace in Space, the group challenging U.S. space military activities in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where the U.S. Space Command is headquartered. The U.S. military not only acknowledges – it proudly points to – U.S. corporate interests being involved in helping set U.S. space military doctrine. President Dwight Eisenhower warned in his farewell address to the nation in 1959 of the “military-industrial complex.” That linkage is stressed in the U.S. Space Command’s Long Range Plan. The Long Range Plan, which also unscrolls Star Wars style, states: “The Long Range Plan has been US Space Command’s #1 priority for the past 11 months, investing nearly 20 man-years to make it a reality. The development and production process, by design, involved hundreds of people including about 75 corporations.” The Long Range Plan subsequently provides a list – beginning with Aerojet and followed by Boeing, Hughes Space, Lockheed Martin, Rand Corp., Raytheon, Sparta Corp., TRW, and Vista Technologies. “Now is the time,” states The Long Range Plan, issued in 1998, “to begin developing space capabilities, innovative concepts of operations for warfighting, and organizations that can meet the challenges of the 21st Century. . . . Even as military forces have become more downsized in the 1990s, their commitments have steadily increased. As military operations become more lethal, space power enables our streamlined forces to minimize the loss of blood and national treasure. . . . Space power in the 21st Century looks similar to previous military revolutions, such as aircraft-carrier warfare and Blitzkrieg.” The time has come to address, among warfighters and national policy makers,” The Long Range Plan goes on, “the emergence of space as a center of gravity for DoD [Department of Defense] and the nation. We must commit enough planning and resources to protect and enhance our access to, and use of, space. Although international treaties and legalities constrain some of the LRP’s [Long Range Plan’s] initiatives and concepts, our abilities in space will keep evolving as we address these legal, political, and international concerns.” Not to worry about international law, says the U.S. Space Command. It’ll be taken care of. The Long Range Plan – with boxed quotes such as General Ronald Fogelman, Air Force chief of staff, saying: “I think that space, in and of itself, is going to be very quickly recognized as a fourth dimension of warfare” – makes a series of declarations: “The United States will remain a global power and exert global leadership.... It is unlikely that the United States will face a global military peer competitor through 2020. . . . The United States won’t always be able to forward base its forces. . . . Widespread communications will highlight disparities in resources and quality of life-contributing to unrest in developing countries. . . . The global economy will continue to become more interdependent. Economic alliances, as well as the growth and influence of multi-national corporations, will blur security agreements. . . . The gap between ‘have’ and ‘have-not’ nations will widen-creating regional unrest. . . . The United States will remain the only nation able to project power globally. . . . One of the long acknowledged and commonly understood advantages of space-based platforms is no restriction or country clearances to overfly a nation from space. We expect this advantage to endure. . . . Achieving space superiority during conflicts will be critical to the US success on the battlefield.” The Long Range Plan continues on for more than one hundred pages detailing U.S. plans for “Control of Space,” “Full Spectrum Dominance,” ‘Full Force Integration,’ and “Global Engagement.” “Space is the ultimate ‘high ground,”’ says Guardians of the High Frontier, a 1997 U.S. Air Force Space Command report. “Master of Space,”a motto of the Air Force Space Command, appears as a Space Command uniform patch displayed in Guardians of the High Frontier and is emblazoned on the front entrance of a major Space Command element, the 50th Space Wing in Colorado. Master of Space – that pretty well sums up the U.S. military attitude toward space. “The future of the Air Force is space,” flatly declares Almanac 2000, a just-issued Air Force Space Command publication. It states that into the twenty-first century the U.S. Air Force needs to be “Globally dominant – Tomorrow’s Air Force will likely dominate the air and space around the world. . . . Selectively lethal – The Air Force may fight intense, decisive wars with great precision. . . . The future Air Force will be better able to monitor and shape world events.” U.S. military leaders are blunt in describing U.S. plans for space warfare. In 1996, General Joseph Ashy, then commander-in-chief of the U.S. Space Command, told Aviation Week & Space Technology that “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.” Ashy spoke of “space control,” the U.S. military’s term for controlling space, and “space force application,” its definition for dominating Earth from space. Said General Ashy: “We’ll expand into these two missions because they will become increasingly important. We will engage terrestrial targets someday – ships, airplanes, land targets – from space. We will engage targets in space, from space.” Or as Keith Hall, assistant secretary of the U.S. Air Force for Space in the Clinton-Gore administration, told the National Space Club in 1997: “With regard to space dominance, we have it, we like it, and we’re going to keep it.” And that was before George W. Bush became president. Far more than reports and rhetoric are involved. A multimillion-dollar project now underway involves the “Space-Based Laser,” initially named the “Space-Based Laser Readiness Demonstrator.” The promotional poster for this laser shows it firing in space while a U.S. flag somehow manages to wave in space above it. Last November, the DoD requested public comment on an “Environmental Assessment” for full development of the Space-Based Laser. The development program is estimated at $20 to $30 billion, according to the Public Affairs Office of the Army’s Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, headquarters of the U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Command and among the four finalists for the Space-Based Laser test facility. Then there is a second space-based laser already in testing, the Alpha high-energy laser. Built by TRW, it conducted its twenty-second successful test firing on April 26, 2000. “In addition to producing about 25 percent more power than previous tests, Alpha generated an output beam that was almost perfectly round and more uniform in energy density,” proclaimed a happy Dan Novoseller, TRW’s Alpha Laser Optimization program manager after the firing. “Megawatt Laser Test Brings Space Based Lasers One Step Closer,” exclaimed Space Daily, a space Web site, about the test in an article that included a drawing of the Alpha laser with the caption: “Turning swords into lasers.” Some $6 billion a year – plus funds in the “black” or secret – have been going into U.S. space military activities. Much is being spent on U.S. Ballistic Missile Defense, formerly Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. Missile defense? In the fuller picture, the DoD is largely seeking offensive measures. Star Wars proponents regard missile defense – and have through the years – as one layer of a broad U.S. program for space warfare. This multilayered program will include theater defense (weaponry used in or in close proximity to an area of conflict), space-based weaponry, and missile defense. Well aware of the U.S. space warfare plans, other nations of the world arranged for a vote in the UN General Assembly in New York on November 20, 2000 to reaffirm the Outer Space Treaty and, specifically, its provision that space be reserved for peaceful uses. Some one hundred sixty-three nations voted for the resolution, titled “Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space.” It recognized “the common interest of all mankind in the exploration and use of outer space for peaceful purposes” and reiterated that the use of space “shall be for peaceful purposes . . . carried out for the benefit and in the interest of all countries.” The measure stated that the “prevention of an arms race in outer space would avert a grave danger for international peace and security.” Three nations refused to support the resolution: the United States, Israel, and Micronesia. They abstained. In 1999, there was a similarly lopsided vote on an identical resolution. There has been a consistent U.S. pattern in international forums in recent times of opposing efforts to keep space for peace as set forth in the Outer Space Treaty. Ironically, the United States was deeply involved in initiating the Outer Space Treaty, according to Craig Eisendrath, a former U.S. State Department officer who helped in its creation. Keeping space weapons-free was the original intent of the treaty, said Eisendrath. The Soviet Union had launched its Sputnik satellite in 1957, and “we sought,” he said, ‘to de-weaponize space before it got weaponized.” A model the State Department used for its draft of the Outer Space Treaty, said Eisendrath, was the Antarctic Treaty, which bars military deployments and provides that “Antarctica shall continue forever to be exclusively used for peaceful purposes.” The Soviet Union and the United Kingdom joined the United States in presenting the treaty, and it was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1966. Initially ratified by ninety-six nations, an additional twenty-seven have since signed on. It entered into force in October 1967. The final wording of the treaty provided that “State Parties to the Treaty undertake not to place in orbit around Earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction, install such weapons on celestial bodies, or station such weapons in outer space in any other manner.” The intent of the Outer Space Treaty was to keep war out of space, said Eisendrath, now a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy in Washington, D.C., and co-author of the forthcoming book, The Phantom Defense: America’s Pursuit of the Star Wars Illusion. Eisendrath views the deployment in space of weapons, such as the lasers that the U.S. military has been and is pursuing, as a violation of the Outer Space Treaty. To clear up any confusion and specifically bar any weapons in space, both Canada and China have been highly active at the United Nations in seeking to bolster the Outer Space Treaty with an agreement to ban all weapons in space. In a UN presentation in 1999, Marc Vidricaire, counsellor of the Permanent Mission of Canada, noted that “Canada first formally proposed . . . a legally binding instrument [for a] ban of the weaponization of space” in January 1997 and renewed the proposal in 1999. He cited in his speech the U.S. Space Command’s Long Range Plan “including its recommendation to ‘shape [the] international community to accept space-based weapons.”’ The Canadian diplomat said: “Our objective is to ensure that pursuing the concepts of space control and force application are not extended by any state to include actual deployment of weapons in outer space.” On October 19, 2000, Vidricaire was again sounding the alarm on behalf of Canada at the United Nations. ‘Outer space has not yet witnessed the introduction of space-based weapons. This could change if the international community does not first prevent this destabilizing development through the timely negotiation of measures banning the introduction of weapons into outer space,” he said. “It has been suggested that our proposal is not relevant because the assessment on which it rests is either premature or alarmist,’ Vidricaire said. “In our view, it is neither. One need only look at what is happening right now to realize that it is not premature. . . . We have heard often before that there is no arms race in outer space. We agree. We would like to keep it that way for the sake of our own national security and for international peace and security as whole. . . . There is no question that the technology can be developed to place weapons in outer space. There is also no question that no state can expect to maintain a monopoly on such knowledge – or such capabilities – for all time. If one state actively pursues the weaponization of space, we can be sure others will follow.” Russian President Vladimir Putin, in his first address last September to the “Millennium Summit” at the United Nations stated that “particularly alarming are the plans for the militarization of the outer space” and proposed “under the umbrella of the United Nations, an international conference on prevention of the outer space militarization.” In Canada last December, Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien and Putin, who was visiting Canada, issued a joint statement announcing that “Canada and the Russian Federation will continue close cooperation in preventing an arms race in outer space, including interaction in the preparation and holding in Moscow in the spring of 2001 of an international conference on the non-weaponization of outer space.” The DoD, however, sees space as a medium for deploying weapons capable of killing with pinpoint accuracy. As New World Vistas: Air and Space Power for the 21st Century, a 1996 U.S. Air Force Board report, states:    In the next two decades, new technologies will allow the fielding of space-based weapons of devastating effectiveness to be used to deliver energy and mass as force projection in tactical and strategic conflict. . . . These advances will enable lasers with reasonable mass and cost to effect very many kills.    This can be done rapidly, continuously, and with surgical precision, minimizing exposure of friendly forces. The technologies exist or can be developed in this time period.    Force application by kinetic kill weapons will enable pinpoint strikes on target anywhere in the world. The Equivalent of the Desert Storm strategic air campaign against Iraqi infrastructure would be possible to complete in minutes to hours essentially on immediate notice. But there is a problem: space weapons, especially lasers, require large amounts of energy and “power limitations impose restrictions” thus making “space-based weapons relatively unfeasible” now. U.S. military plans for space will likely involve the use of nuclear power as an energy source for space-based weapons. “A natural technology to enable high power is nuclear power in space,” says New World Vistas. “Setting the emotional issues of nuclear power aside, this technology offers a viable alternative for large amounts of power in space.” The fifteen-volume report was prepared not only by U.S. military officers but also, according to its appendix, high corporate, civilian, and academic figures, including, for its Space Technology volume, a Lockheed Martin vice president, a manager from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a NASA astronaut (Ronald Sega), and academics from MIT and Cornell. With the Bush-Cheney takeover, the United States has an administration thoroughly gung-ho for Star Wars. Bush has a “grandiose scheme for a real, all-out Star Wars scenario,” as Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory described it. “I wrote the Republican Party’s foreign policy platform,” Bruce Jackson, vice president of corporate strategy and development of Lockheed Martin, told me in an interview. Jackson said he was selected to be “the overall chairman of the Foreign Policy Platform Committee” at the Republican National Convention, at which he was a delegate. Thus the Bush administration will be using a foreign policy platform admittedly written by a top executive of Lockheed Martin, the world’s biggest weapons manufacturer and one of the four key corporations – TRW, Boeing, and Raytheon are the others – involved in U.S. space warfare preparations. Jackson said that during the campaign he did not lead the advocacy for “full development of missile defense” because, considering Lockheed Martin’s heavy involvement, that “would be an implicit conflict of interest with my day job.” Instead, he said, this was done by Stephen J. Hadley. Hadley, an assistant secretary for defense for international security policy in the administration of Bush’s father, left his partnership in the Washington law firm of Shea & Gardner – which represents Lockheed Martin – to become deputy director of the National Security Council under George W Bush. “Space is going to be important. It has a great future in the military,” Hadley, speaking as an advisor to Bush, told the Air Force Association in an address at its national convention last September. He stated that Bush’s “concern has been that the [Clinton] administration’s proposal does not do the job right and it doesn’t reflect a real commitment to missile defense. . . . This is an administration that has delayed on that issue and is not moving as fast as he thinks we could.” In the Bush choice of Donald Rumsfeld as U.S. secretary of defense, the United States got a man whom The Washington Post called the “leading proponent not only of national missile defenses, but also of U.S. efforts to take control of outer space.” In 1998, a U.S. commission headed by Rumsfeld – most of its members appointed by then House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senator Majority Leader Trent Lott, both arch-conservatives – reversed a 1995 finding by the nation’s intelligence agencies that the country was not in imminent danger from ballistic missiles developed by new powers. Rumsfeld has been described by the avidly pro-Star Wars right-wing Center for Security Policy as a trusted advisor and a financial supporter, and in 1998 the center awarded him its Keeper of the Flame award. The center’s advisory board includes such Star Wars promoters as Edward Teller and Lockheed Martin executives, including Bruce Jackson. Cheney is a former board member of TRW, and his wife, Lynn Cheney, only left her long-term board position with Lockheed Martin weeks before the new administration took office. Both, too, have links with right-wing pro-Star Wars groups. Said Gagnon of the Bush-Cheney administration: “This so-called election is a major victory for those who intend to put weapons into space at an enormous cost to the U.S. taxpayer and to world stability.” He noted statements by Bush during the campaign that the United States should design and deploy “quantum leap weapons” and that Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories would play a major role in developing weapons that will allow the United States “to redefine war on our terms.” Both laboratories have been deeply involved in space-based laser work. A strong stand against missile defense and Star Wars was taken in the 2000 election campaign by Green Party candidate Ralph Nader and Socialist Party candidate David McReynolds. Democrat Al Gore maintained that any missile defense system should be limited in scope. So-called centrist political elements in the United States — including many elected Democrats — have backed a program of space warfare. “The Democratic Party has shown over and over again that it is in consonance with these plans for space warfare and global domination,” said Gagnon. “it is not just right-wing kooks and the military promoting Star Wars. It’s what we can call the ‘power structure.”’ Military Space Forces: The Next 50 Years, a book commissioned by the Democratic-controlled U.S. Congress of the mid-1980s, is strong evidence of Democratic support for space-based weapons. This blueprint for space warfare is as extreme and wild as anything out of the U.S. Space Command or a right-wing think tank, and yet it is endorsed by a group composed mainly of Democratic congressmen. Facsimile signatures of Democratic Representatives Ike Skelton of Missouri and John Spratt of South Carolina, both of whom support missile defense, top the list of officials signing off on the “Congressional Introduction.” Then there are the signatures of then Senator John Glenn of Ohio, the ex-astronaut and a Democrat (given a NASA space shuttle ride in 1999); then Representative Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat (representing Cape Canaveral and the rest of the “Space Coast,” who got his NASA space shuttle ride in 1986 and in 2000 was elected a U.S. Senator); and Representative Harold Volkmer, a Missouri Democrat. The two Republicans are Representative John Kasich of Ohio and Ben Blaz, a nonvoting member of the House from Guam. The “Congressional Introduction” says that Congress asked John M. Collins, senior specialist in national defense at the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress, “in June 1987 to prepare ‘a frame of reference that could help Congress evaluate future, as well as present, military space policies, programs and budgets.”’ After a foreword by General John L. Piotrowski, then commander-in-chief of the U.S. Space Command, Military Space Forces opens with a consideration of economic and military enterprises on the moon. “The moon is rich,” it says, ‘in many natural resources. . . . Iron, titanium, aluminum, manganese, and calcium are abundant. . . . Simple machines could easily strip top layers.” Military bases on the moon would not only defend the mining operations but could take advantage of what Military Space Forces calls the “gravity well” of Earth. This is described as a channel in space between the moon and Earth. “Military space forces at the bottom of Earth’s so-called gravity well are poorly positioned to accomplish offensive/defensive/deterrent missions, because great energy is needed to overcome gravity during launch,” it says, but “forces at the top [on the moon]” could act “more rapidly. Put simply, it takes less energy to drop objects down a well than to cast them out. Forces at the top also enjoy more maneuvering room and greater reaction time.” A map of the best site on the moon from which the United States could take military advantage of this gravity well is provided, and the work stresses that U.S. “armed forces might lie in wait at that location to hijack rival shipments” of materials mined by other nations. The United States, according to this congressionally authored plan, would engage in space piracy. Combat on the moon is discussed with the observation that “Lunar foxholes would provide better cover than terrestrial counterparts, because the absence of air confines blast effects to much smaller areas.” The book examines use of chemical and biological warfare in space and states: “Self-contained biospheres in space accord a superlative environment for chemical and biological warfare. . . . Clandestine operatives could dispense lethal or incapacitating CW/BW agents rapidly and uniformly through enemy facilities.” As for the UN Charter, which seeks “‘peaceful and friendly international relations”; the Outer Space Treaty, which designates space as a place where “exploration and other endeavors ‘shall be carried out for the benefit . . . of all mankind’”; and the Moon Agreement of 1979, which says “neither the surface nor the subsurface of the moon” or “other celestial bodies within the solar system [shall] become the property” of any person or state, Military Space Forces declares: “The strength of such convictions will be tested when economic competition quickens in space.” A good way to keep other nations from engaging in space militarily, it goes on, is to “control attitudes” in other countries. “Control over elitist and popular opinion, using inexpensive psychological operations as a non-lethal weapon system, could convince rivals that it would be useless to start or continue military space programs,” it says. “The basic objective would be to deprive opponents of freedom of action, while preserving it for oneself. Senior national executives, legislators, members of the mass media, and, through them, the body politic, would be typical targets.” Military Space Forces also urges the use of nuclear power in space, both plutonium-fueled radioisotope thermoelectric generators and nuclear reactors that are “the only known long-lived, compact source able to supply military space forces with electric power about 10 kilowatts and multimegawatts. . . . Cores no bigger than basketballs are able to produce about 100 kw, enough for ‘housekeeping’ aboard space stations and at lunar outposts. Larger versions could meet multimegawatt needs of space-based lasers, neutral particle beams, mass drivers, and railguns.” Among the endorsements featured on the back cover of Military Space Forces are then Senator Sam Nunn, a Georgia Democrat and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who states that “This book will be an indispensable starting point.” Representative Les Aspin, a Wisconsin Democrat, later a secretary defense under Clinton states “No other military space study puts all pieces of the puzzle together.” General John W. Vessey Jr., former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, states Military Space Forces “should be useful for decades.” There are Democrats, of course, emphatically against the U.S. weaponization of space. In the House of Representatives, leading opponents of Star Wars include Cynthia McKinney of Georgia, Lynn Woolsey of California, and Dennis Kucinich of Ohio. “Leave Star Wars to the movies,” declared McKinney on the House floor in April 2000, as the three made an effort to stop a missile defense bill. She spoke of the tens of billions of dollars that have been “squandered on Star Wars. Now they have changed the name to National Missile Defense, but it is the same thing.” “The U.S. Space Command calls for expanded war-fighting capabilities in outer space. The guiding words in this country,” said Kucinich, “ought to be ‘they will be done on earth as it is in heaven,’ not ‘war be done in heaven as it is on Earth.’ Let us work for peace on Earth, not war in space.” Later that week, Kucinich gave the keynote address at the 2000 meeting of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, which was titled “Star Wars Revisited: An International Conference on Preventing an Arms Race In Space.” “We know that moving forward with a national missile defense system will set the stage for advancement and proliferation of nuclear weapons in space,” Kucinich declared. “And we know that once we continue down this road, we’re going to be locked into funding an industry that makes missiles, and antimissiles, and creates policies to promote the use of missiles, and more spending on missiles.” Kucinich spoke of the opposition of the United States in the United Nations to the resolution seeking to prevent an arms race in outer space by reaffirming the Outer Space Treaty. “It’s my belief that the United States must sign on, and send a message to the world that space is for peace, not war. . . . Unfortunately, there are policy makers aimed at having the country make a statement totally the opposite.” He dismissed the claim by “advocates of the missile [defense] system that the system is not Star Wars all over again, it’s ground wars. . . . Let’s name names. Lockheed Martin. TRW. Boeing. They now have a contract to build the space-based laser weapons that will be the follow-on technology to ballistic missile defense. This weapons system will enable the United States to have offensive capability in space, as called for by” – and he held up Vision for 2020. “It seems that Orwell’s vision of 1984 just follows the curve of time, and now it’s taken us into 2020 where the vision of the United States Space Command is for war in space. Because what this states is that the U.S. Space Command intends to control and dominate space. Seize the heavens. The high ground.” Grassroots action to prevent the weapons from becoming a war zone is vital. “Creating a global democratic debate about the kind of seed that humankind should carry into space is the ultimate goal of the Global Network,” said Gagnon. “The vision of people worldwide gazing at the moon and stars, sharing this tiny planet in space and speaking with a collective voice that calls for protecting space from the evils that we have sown on this earth, is the true work of the Global Network. Members of the organization do not accept that we must continue to squander hundreds of billions of dollars on research and development for space-based lasers, antisatellite weapons, and nuclear powered rockets. The time has come to say enough is enough!” Kofi Annan, in opening the Third United Nations Conference on Exploration and Peaceful Uses of Outer Space held in Vienna in 1999 declared: “We must not allow this century, so plagued with war and suffering, to pass on its legacy, when the technology at our disposal will be even more awesome. We cannot view the expanse of space as another battleground for our earthly conflicts.” This, however, is not the vision of the “power structure” of the United States. There must be strong opposition in the United States and international action – and a global agreement banning all weapons in space. Said Gagnon: “The people of the U.S., the people of the world, must learn what the U.S. is up to-and stop it.” Reprinted with permission Copyright 2001 by Karl Grossman APR Home Page | Subscriptions | Back Issues | Zine Reviews | Staff | Art Ads | Links | News | Events | Search Email Us! Updated: August 4, 2002