By 1989, SDI had evolved toward a plan called “Brilliant Pebbles” – a system based not on laser weapons, but on another of Teller’s ideas: hundreds of space-based kinetic kill vehicles ringing the earth would attack enemy missiles as they travelled through space toward America. The idea of such an aggressive militarization of space – and its ever-ballooning price tag – finally elicited a huge public outcry against “Star Wars,” as SDI was dubbed. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and the Republicans were beaten in the 1992 elections, the Clinton Administration appeared to terminate SDI. In 1993, however, Les Aspin, Clinton’s first defence secretary, immediately set up a new missile-defence program, renamed it the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, and gave it Star Wars’ entire $3.8-billion annual budget. The return of Congressional Republicans to legislative power in the mid-nineties triggered a massive new bonanza for defense contractors. And in 2002, President Bush abrogated the 1972 ABM treaty, which had prohibited developing, testing, or deploying space-based missile-defence systems. He also changed the name of Clinton’s National Missile Defense to New Missile Defense. The bill for the whole “layered” stack of land, sea, air, and space weapons is now estimated at anywhere from $53 billion to $1 trillion.
As anybody who ever stared upwards on a starry night will easily comprehend, outer space has plenty to offer as a military playground. Since the 1950s, the U.S., China, Russia, and even the nominally pacifist European Union have all lofted sizeable military surveillance, communications, and weapons-targeting systems into orbit. More recently, U.S. officials have begun describing space as a frontier war zone. In 1996, General Joseph Ashy, then Commander-in-Chief of both U.S. Space Command and norad, declared, “We’re going to fight a war in space. We’re going to fight from space and we’re going to fight into space.”
In a 1997 vision statement, U.S. Space Command argued that by “integrating space forces into war-fighting capabilities across the full spectrum of conflict,” as U.S. forces did in the Gulf, Iraq, and Afghanistan wars, U.S. space forces have become “lucrative military targets” warranting “a critical need to control the space medium to ensure U.S. dominance on future battlefields.”
In 1999, Pennsylvania Republican Curt Weldon, a Bush adviser who assumed Congressional leadership for missile-defence efforts, told reporters, “We’re probably going to have to use space-based assets. We might as well be honest about that. In the end, the most capable response will come from outer space.”
In October, 2002, four months after President Bush scrapped the 1972 ABM treaty, his assistant secretary of defence, Paul Wolfowitz, announced: “Space offers attractive options not only for missile defence but for a broad range of interrelated civil and military missions. It truly is the ultimate high ground. We are exploring concepts and technologies for space-based intercepts.”
That matches the view of Lieutenant General Ronald Kadish, Director of the Missile Defence Agency, who would like to see some three hundred or more space-based interceptors as early as 2012. “Space solves your geography problem,” Kadish told a Congressional committee last year. “You can use those weapons more effectively from the high ground of space.” Since then, the U.S. Air Force has established a new Space Operation Directorate, started a Space Warfare Center, and established the 527th Space Aggressor Squadron and the 76th Space Control Squadron to develop and test space planning and systems.
So far, the work is going well. George W. Bush has pledged to deploy a rudimentary ground-based missile-defence system by next September. According to the Missile Defence Agency, the first elements of a tested system will be in place by that date, with missile silos on ten warships as well as in Alaska, and radars in Alaska, California, and the U.K., controlled from Cheyenne Mountain. Once this ground-based layer is operating, work on air-and space-based layers will begin, with a system of up to thirty satellites in low orbit capable of tracking enemy missiles for the ground-based interceptors. Work is also under way on an air-based layer involving modified jumbo jets carrying massive lasers on the edge of the atmosphere, almost in outer space. And work continues on a space layer involving a mix of surveillance and attack systems, including space-based lasers. The head of the space-laser effort, Colonel William N. McCasland, says the hope is to build a system that will “deny access to space,” “deny information to/from satellites,” and engage in “defensive/offensive counter-air operations.” TheMissile Defence Agency has also iss-ued contracts to develop what it calls “small, high-power, laser radar systems” to support a “future Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle.”
“Many people in the U.S., as well as Canada, don’t realize how long-standing the U.S. military effort to put weapons in space within missile-defence programs is,” says Phillip Coyle, who ran the Pentagon’s missile-defence testing program and is now senior adviser for the Center for Defense Information in Washington. According to Coyle, tests on space weapons are now discreetly under way at U.S. Air Force facilities in Albuquerque, New Mexico. “It’s very hard to know what’s going on,” he says, “but every once in a while we learn about one of these efforts.” By way of example, Coyle points to the recently revealed effort to design weapons to protect sbirs, a space-based infrared detection system. “The aim is to develop and test space-based weapons designed to protect the NMD assets,” Coyle says. “But once they get the weapons up there, they will automatically take on offensive capabilities.”
For nearly sixty years, Canada has been caught between two conflicting roles: as a world leader in disarmament efforts, and as a player in the drive for continental military integration. Canada and the U.S. formed a Military Cooperation Committee in 1945; this was followed by the establishment of norad (to “Deter, Detect, Defend”) in 1958. Today, according to the Department of National Defence, there are over eighty treaty-level defence agreements, more than two hundred and fifty memoranda of understanding between the two defence departments, and approximately 145 bilateral forums in which defence matters are discussed.
But the most significant entrenchment of Canada-U.S. military co-operation in recent years has been the government’s 1994 Defence White Paper. Revealingly, it ranked space first among concerns for future Canada-U.S. military coperation. “With the advent of missile warfare, the role of space in protecting the modern state has taken on added significance,” the government said.
