 |
 |
September 2000
By Dave Webb, Leeds, England
|
The Nuclearisation and Militarisation of Space - A Brief History
September 2000
By Dave Webb, Leeds, England |
1. The Ethical Controversy
Scientific, military and civilian activities in space have always been controversial, involving questions such as: In a democratic society it is often argued
that for a particular project to obtain funds from the public
purse, it has to be approved and scrutinized by a democratically
elected government or its appointed servants. So individuals do
not need to justify their participation in these projects as they
have already been sanctioned by society. However, others argue
that people should make their own moral and ethical judgements
especially when public policies may have been arrived at through
compromise, misinformation and/or powerful lobbying by vested
interests. To date there have been over 4,000
world-wide orbital space launches. In October 1971 the UK
successfully launched a scientific satellite, Prospero,
into orbit using the Black Arrow rocket from Woomera in South
Australia. There have been several other British built rockets - Black
Knight, Blue Streak and Skylark, essentially
developed as part of defence and scientific programmes. However,
the UK rocket programme was abandoned due to excessive costs
although it is possible to see a real Black Arrow rocket in the
Space Gallery at the Science Museum, London. Although the UK Government now often uses
the French Ariane rockets to launch scientific satellites,
it relies heavily on US systems for the development of scientific
and defence projects. The major players in the development of
space systems have, of course, been the United States and the
Soviet Union (and now Russia) - although recently Europe (through
the European Space Agency, ESA), China and India can add
their names to the list of "space capable" nations.
A major driving force behind developments
in it may help to look at the historical development of the
subject. A comprehensive history of US developments in space can
be found in [1].
2.1 In the beginning … the military The military use of space could be said to
have started with the German deployment of the V2
rocket towards the end of World War II. The "V"
in "V2" stands for Vergeltung (vengence). At one time
V2 construction was moved to Nordhausen, or the Mittelwerk Dora,
in the middle of Germany where concentration camp labour was used
to produce them. Half of the estimated sixty thousand prisoners
who entered Dora did not leave it alive.
The use of the atomic bomb by the US on Japan had a significant
effect on the cold war between the Soviet Union and the
Allies after the war. The US and the Soviets developed
their missile programmes separately and in secret using
captured German technological knowledge and skills. 2.2 … and scientific use of space. The
Soviets also announced the intention to launch a
satellite, which they did in 1957. After the launch of
the Soviet sputnik the US were desperate to launch their
own satellite. However the first attempt on (6th December
1957) blew up on the launch pad with the whole world
watching. Despite this deep humiliation a small
scientific satellite called Explorer I eventually
lifted off on 31 January 1958 and went on to discover the
Earth’s radiation belts (http://www.spaceviews.com/1998/02/article1a.html)
The importance of space support for navigation
and communications was recognized early in the space era.
The US Navy launched the world's first military navigational
satellite system, Transit lA, in September 1959 and used
them to improve the accuracy of Polaris submarines to
about 1 mile. The US Army launched the first military
communication satellite, Courier lB on 4 October 1960. The first US Antiballistic Missile (ABM)
test launch took place on 16th December 1959. However, the
programme was cancelled in May 1959 because the mechanical
tracking radars were too slow and the computers were not powerful
enough. After the deployment of the US Discoverer
reconnaissance satellites, the Soviet Union developed several
antisatellite (ASAT) systems in the 1960s and the US also
developed ASAT systems as a countermeasure. An important component of the
missile warning system was, and still is, the Ballistic
Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) which
includes powerful radar systems in Alaska, at Thule in
Greenland and at Fylingdales in North Yorkshire. The success of the NASA Mercury and Gemini
systems led some military planners to look seriously at military
applications for men in space. In 1962 there was enormous
pressure from the US government to give the US Air Force at least
an equal role in the Gemini program. NASA at first claimed that
this level of involvement would jeopardize its ability to meet
the lunar landing schedule and would signal the militarisation of
the civilian space program – however, some Department of
Defense (DOD) experiments were carried on Gemini. In July
1963, NASA suggested a space station program with a possible
military mission for man in space. 1967 saw the UN General Assembly introduce The
Outer Space Treaty, which reserves space for peaceful
purposes. It is now agreed by 91 nations including the US, Russia
and the UK. The Outer Space Treaty bans nuclear weapons and
weapons of mass destruction from space, it also says that nations
shall not "contaminate" space, that "states
shall be liable for damage caused by their space objects"
and that "the exploration and use of outer space shall be
carried on for the benefit and in the interests of all countries
and shall be the province of all mankind". In 1968 physicists Richard L. Garwin and
Hans A. Bethe described how China or the Soviet Union could
easily elude the "light" US missile shield then under
development [2]. There was a fear that such a system would
provoke the Soviet Union and escalate the arms race. It was
mainly because any national defense system would be
technologically ineffective that the U.S. and the Soviet Union
signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 1972.
After this there was some collaboration and information sharing
between the US and the USSR. Both launched vehicles on 15 July
1975 and on 18 July, Apollo 18 docked with the Soviet Soyuz 19
spacecraft in the last US space flight for nearly six years. In October 1977, Secretary of Defense
Harold Brown announced that the Soviets had an operational ASAT
system and signaled a redirection in the Carter administration's
military space program. The Space Defense Program was
initiated in 1977 to research into ASAT technology, satellite
survivability, and improved space surveillance. 2.3 President Reagan and Star Wars President Reagan made his first speech on
space policy on 4 July 1982 at the fourth space shuttle landing.
He said that steps must be taken to provide "assured
access to space''. A DOD directive at that time (NSDD-42)
stated that the ASAT programme was to deny the enemy the use of
space and space assets in time of war or crisis. It also extended
the principle of sovereign rights over a nation's space assets to
include the right to defend those assets in space. President
Reagan went on to make his famous Star Wars Speech on 23
March 1983, in which he announced the Strategic Defense
Initiative (SDI) and called for defensive measures to render
Soviet missiles obsolete. This was a direct move away from the
policy of mutually assured destruction (MAD) to a policy
of strategic defense as a means of deterrence. The ABM Treaty was
signed in 1972 by the US and the Soviet Union and
prohibits the deployment of a nationwide defense against
strategic ballistic missile attack. From 1983 to 1987 the
US position on the SDI and the ABM Treaty was that the
treaty banned deployment but not research and
development. However, at a Washington press conference on
May 13 1986, 3,700 senior scientists and engineers,
including 3 Nobel laureates, from universities around the
US publicly pledged not to take SDI funds [3]. 2.4 NASA - the military options After the end of the Apollo programme the
funding for NASA fell sharply. It became US government policy
that NASA become more involved in co-operative ventures with
commercial and military projects. In the 80s NASA and US Space Command joined
forces to release spy satellites during classified shuttle
missions and have agreed to work together in: "several
areas of mutual interest in the hopes of saving both
organisations costs and sharing in new technologies to benefit
future spaceflight and spacecraft". Partnership teams
were formed to study: 2.5 Militarisation of Space Satellites are now commonly used for
communications and surveillance and the information they provide
is used by military commanders to monitor battlefields, develop
their strategy, organise their forces and target their weapons.
The increasing importance of satellites in the surveillance and
management of modern warfare has led to the recognition that, in
order to retain control and ensure communications, important
military satellites need to be protected. This is a major reason
for the increase in research into weapons systems to defend
spacecraft and even threaten "enemy" space based
systems. US Space Command’s "Vision 2020"
[4] argues that the protection of space requires superior
US space warfare capability and proclaims itself "stewards
for military space" and sets out two principle
themes: The adopted methodology involves four
operational concepts: A US
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...to effect very many kills." [6] These plans are obviously worrying to other
national leaders and governments. Speaking in Geneva last
January, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan urged the UN's annual
Conference on Disarmament to "codify principles which can
ensure that outer space remains weapons-free". At the UN's Conference on Disarmament in
March 1999, China moved to strengthen the Outer Space Treaty, to "negotiate
and conclude an international legal instrument banning…any
weapons, weapons systems and their components in outer space,
with a view to preventing the weaponization of outer space". However, in November 1999 the UN General
Assembly was asked to reaffirm the Outer Space Treaty and,
specifically, its provision that space shall be used "for
peaceful purposes" and the "exploration and use
of outer space…shall be carried out for the benefit and in
the interest of all countries." Some 138 nations voted
for the motion titled: "Prevention of an Arms Race in
Outer Space." The United States, joined by Israel,
abstained. 2.6 Beware - Creeping Militarism Just because a space project does not
appear to have any military interests – it doesn’t mean
that will always be the case. Very often space projects are sold
to the public for one reason (e.g. spotting ecological disasters)
- but as soon as the technology can be demonstrated it is sold
out to the highest bidder (i.e. the military).
The Kosovo war made it clear that Europe depends on US satellite
systems for intelligence gathering. This appears to be unsatisfactory
both to the US and the EC. The report clearly positions Europe as the
counterpart of the US with respect to "dominance in space" and
"information superiority". It sees Europe as an "equal" partner and:
"By developing its own infrastructure, Europe will ... prevent other
competitors (from Asia in particular) from developing their own
infrastructure. By doing that Europe will become the alternative to the
US for the world, will consolidate its number 2 position in space and
will therefore be able to become a privileged partner on global issiues
and large-scale international developments."
2.7 Nuclearisation of Space Three nuclear devices are currently in use in space: In 1986 NASA were due to launch two space
shuttles with plutonium-fueled space probes aboard. Investigative
reporter Karl Grossman got to hear of this after reading
about the plan in a Department of Energy publication, Energy
Insider which said that the government had evaluated the
consequences of an accident with the probes on launch. Grossman
filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for more
information in 1984. It took him nearly a year to obtain it [9].
What the government finally advised was that there could be quite
a disaster if the plutonium-considered the most dangerous
radioactive substance-was dispersed in an accident but the
likelihood of a catastrophic shuttle accident was but
1-in-100,000. On 28 January 1986 seven astronauts and a
$100 million NASA tracking and data relay system satellite was
lost when the shuttle Challenger exploded
some 70 seconds after launch. If this tragic accident had
happened to Challenger's next mission in May, it would have been
carrying Ulysses, a plutonium-fueled space probe, with 24.2
pounds of plutonium on board. After the Challenger accident, NASA
changed the odds of a catastrophic shuttle accident from
1-in-100,000 to 1-in-76 and the shuttle was grounded for over two
years [9]. NASA said in its Final Environmental
Impact Statement for the Cassini Mission said that if the
probe had made an "inadverent reentry" into the
Earth’s atmosphere during the fly-by, it would have broken
up (Cassini had no heat shield). In this case, plutonium would
have been released and - in NASA's words "approximately 5
billion of the…world population at the time…could
receive 99 percent or more of the radiation exposure." In
various statements NASA stated the chance of anything going wrong
with the flyby as 1 in a million. But Michio Kaku pointed out
that this figure was used to describe the unlikely event of the
probe striking a meteor, he calculated the chance of a system
failure to be more like 10 percent. He also examined NASA’s
figures on a possible human death toll – they projected
2,300 fatal cancers – and noted that they had neglected the
effects of the broadcast of plutonium by wind systems [10]. Many
attempts were made to estimate a possible human death toll some
suggested hundreds of thousands, while others thought millions
was more likely [11]. NASA did say in the Final Impact Statement,
that if plutonium rained down on areas of natural vegetation, it
might have to "relocate animals," if it fell an
agricultural land, "ban future agricultural land
uses" and, if it rained down on urban areas, to "demolish
some or all structures" and "relocate affected
population permanently." According to a US General Accounting Office
report [12], NASA is "studying eight future space
missions between 2000 and 2015 that will likely use
nuclear-fueled electric generators." The next NASA space
nuclear mission is the Europa Orbiter scheduled for 2003 [13]. 2.7.1 Why use nuclear material in space? Apart from effective lobbying over many
years by groups such as GE and Lockheed Martin who develop and
build the plutonium systems, Grossman [9] believes that NASA has
become more and more reliant on the U.S. military who want
nuclear-powered weapons in space. Lt. Gen. James Abrahamson, former head of
SDI organisations has said, "failure to develop nuclear
power in space could cripple efforts to deploy anti missile
sensors and weapons in orbit".
It is well known that
the first scientific and explorative space missions
employed hardware that had been originally developed for
military purposes and that the race to send astronauts to
the moon was politically motivated.
It was in 1945 that Arthur
C Clarke first suggested using satellites for global
communications. He thought though, that many would
consider this idea 'too far-fetched to be taken
seriously'. However, the RAND Corporation first
proposed a military satellite system in 1946. The weight
of an atomic bomb payload at that time meant that
there was little prospect of them being carried by
rockets for many years. In fact the US started its ICBM
programmes in 1954 - after the development of the smaller
and more powerful hydrogen bomb (first tested on 1st
November 1952) required smaller, less accurate rockets
[1]. The Soviet Union detonated their first hydrogen bomb
in August 1952 and this, together with the launch of
their first sputnik on 4th October
1957, lead to some concern that they would soon be able
to place weapons in orbit around the Earth. This spurred
on rapid US (and USSR) military space developments.
On 28th July 1955 The
US announced its intention to launch a satellite to study
the upper atmosphere during the International Geophysical
Year (IGY - a worldwide scientific event from 15th
July 1957 to 31st December 1958). It was intended that
this programme would follow National Security Council
(NSC) recommendations (laid out in May 1955) to
effectively separate the military and civilian sectors of
the US space effort.
In July 1958 the US government
passed The National Aeronautics and Space Act which officially
divided the civilian and military sectors and created the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
NASA opened on 1st October 1958 and was the brainchild of James
R. Killian, scientific advisor to President Eisenhower. Killian
and Eisenhower devised NASA to be a strictly civilian enterprise,
thereby limiting the military's role in the national space
program. However, Congress wanted a much stronger military role
in space and so created the Civilian-Military Liaison
Committee (to coordinate NASA and Department of Defense [DOD]
activities) and the National Aeronautics and Space Council
(chaired by the president as commander in chief of the US
military to create national space policy). 
NASA’s first major project was the Mercury programme
to send a man into low-Earth orbit. At the same time long-term
planning for Apollo, the US Moon program, began. However,
by late 1960, Eisenhower had become disenchanted with the
tremendous cost of putting someone on the Moon and stopped the
funding for Apollo.
The North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) became
operational on 12th September 1957 to detect and report
on any ICBM attack on the North American continent. In
October 1960, NORAD took on space defence with the
formation of the space detection and tracking system.
NORAD's missions were:
During the Kennedy
administration the military space programs became highly
secretive and publicity was concentrated on the
development of NASA's manned programs. However, the
Soviets again beat the US into space on 12 April 1961,
when Vostok 1 orbited the earth with cosmonaut Yuri
Gagarin on board. 
On 5 May 1961, US Navy Commander Alan
B. Shepard became the first American to go into space
with a suborbital flight. Twenty days later came
President Kennedy’s historic call to put a man on
the moon by the end of the decade.
During 1963 space
systems played an important role in the Cuban missile
crisis –because of US satellites, Kennedy knew
that the capabilities of the Soviet nuclear forces were
quite limited.
The first manned flight to the
Moon’s environment was by Apollo 8 in December 1968,
followed by the first manned landing on 19 July 1969 by
astronaut Neil Armstrong. NASA was to land men on
the Moon five more times in the next two years but there
were soon drastic NASA budget reductions.
The first space shuttle
flight was 2 years late on 12 April 1981 and astronauts
John Young and Robert Crippen landed Columbia
successfully two days later.
In 1982 President Reagan
designated the space shuttle as the primary launch system for the US national security space program. He
directed DOD and NASA to develop the shuttle and DOD was given
priority on shuttle launches. Also the shuttle was made the
primary launch vehicle for all government payloads, which
guaranteed NASA all the launch business it could handle.
In addition, NASA and the Ballistic
Missile Defense Organization (BMDO) jointly sponsored
The Deep Space Program Science Experiment (DSPSE),
launched in early 1994. In 1997, the Air Force Research
Laboratory, and NASA created the Space Technology
Alliance to coordinate the development of affordable,
effective space technologies. More recently, the US
Department of Defense gave $200 million to NASA to help
pay for the space shuttle Endeavour's January 2000
mission to create high resolution, three-dimensional maps
of the Earth.
General Howell J. Estes III (ex
Commander in Chief of US Space Command) has said "Space
has become the 4th medium in which the military operates
in the protection of our national security interests. We
will help deny the enemy access to space ... through
successful execution of space control and space-based
information warfare."
This "vision" will be
achieved by a "Long Range Plan" [5] the
"Guiding Principles" of which are:
General Joseph Ashy (ex Commander
in Chief US Space Command) has said: "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 development
programs in directed energy and hit-to-kill
mechanisms."
The original European Space Agency statute limits
its activities to peaceful purposes. However, in November 2000 the
ESA and the European Council issued a joint strategy paper on Europe's
role in space [7,8] in which they make it clear that dual-use is inherent to
all space technology, that space plays an important role in a European
defence system, and that they see it as "logical to use the capabilities
of ESA also for the development of the more security-oriented aspects of
the European Space Policy".
For example, in March this year
the Ottawa Citizen reported that Canada's Radarsat 1
satellite, launched in 1995 as a remote sensing satellite
was to become a military spy satellite. The Canadian
Space Agency had said the system would be used solely
used for peaceful assignments - such as mapping forests
and charting the movement of ice in the oceans to help
ships navigate. However, documents obtained by the
Citizen though the Access to Information Act show that
the Canadian Department of National Defence intended to
use Radarsat for military purposes from the time of its
launch. Not only that but Radarsat 1 information and
images are routinely passed to the US DOD and military
spying will be the main job for Radarsat 3 to be launched
in five years time. The Canadian government is also
considering the possible use of Radarsat technology to
find missile launchers and track missiles.
In 1997, NASA successfully launched the Cassini
space probe carrying 72.3 pounds of plutonium – more than
ever used before on a space probe - on a Titan - 4 military
rocket. Three Titan-4's have blown up on launch since giving an
overall failure rate of 1-in-12. Cassini was sent on a sling shot
orbit, bringing it to within 700 miles of the Earth’s
surface on August 17 1999, to use the Earth’s gravity to
help propel it to Saturn. Cassini flew by safely but accidents
can happen and just a few weeks later, on September 23 the Mars
Climate Orbiter was lost because of human error.
| 2.7.2 The Solar alternative The European Space Agency has developed new high efficiency solar cells for use in space-as a substitute for nuclear power. In 2003 ESA is due to launch the Rosetta probe which employs solar arrays for power and will go beyond the orbit of Jupiter to rendezvous with comet Wirtanen at about 675 million km from the Sun. NASA itself has developed solar cells to this standard, however, it insists on using nuclear power for probes to Jupiter and Saturn. |
 |
2.7.3 Accidents involving nuclear devices in space
 |
|
In 1991 NASA and the US DOE entered into a Space Nuclear Power Agreement. Nuclear space flights are now covered by the Price-Anderson Act, which limits liability in the event of a nuclear accident to: $8.9 billion for U.S. domestic damage and $100 million for damage to all foreign nations. This is despite the fact that the Outer Space Treaty specifically says that "States shall be liable for damage caused by their space objects."
2.8 US Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) System – "Son of Star Wars"
 |
Now, more than 30 years after SDI, Washington is saying that it needs a missile defence system designed to protect the US from a potential new threat of missiles fired by "rogue" states such as North Korea, Iran and Iraq. However, George N. Lewis, Theodore A. Postol and John Pike have shown how this system can still be circumvented or swamped by large numbers of actual or decoy missiles [15]. Therefore the BMD system is not seen as a deterrent but as the initiator of an arms race to develop more high technology (including nuclear) weapons to be deployed through and in space. |
 |
 |
 |
BMD consists of National Missile Defence (NMD) and Theatre Missile Defence (TMD) systems for defence against ballistic missiles at home and anywhere where US fighting forces might be in action. The Space-Based Laser currently being researched (a contract for a Space-Based Laser Readiness Demonstrator was signed last year) is a weapon system to be directly deployed in outer space. 14-24 Space-Based Lasers would be deployed at an altitude of 1300 kilometers in outer space. The operational principle of NMD is that the space-based sensors would provide global, continuous surveillance and tracking of adversary missiles, then interceptors would intercept them at the altitude of 100 to 500 kilometers – i.e. in outer space.
The US has already spent an estimated $120 billion in developing missile defense systems. The budget for BMD has held steady at about $4 billion a year. Extra billions are secret, supplied through a "black budget". In March last year the US Congress approved an additional $6.6 billion to be spent up to 2005. In February 2000 the Pentagon proposed that National Missile Defence (NMD) spending be increased to $10.4 billion over the next five years
And BMD/NMD is internationally destabilising because:
France and Germany, have expressed deep-seated concern about the NMD effort - there are fears that it will sour relations with Russia. In fact Russia has already halted progress in a range of arms talks and threatened "retaliatory steps". French Defense Minister Alain Richard has said: "The Europeans are unanimous in calling on the Americans to reflect on the international repercussions of this choice, which can lead to a rupture in the strategic balance." Richard has also stressed that the NMD program "is not very credible militarily or technically." European and U.S. responses might diverge during a crisis with a missile-capable state if Washington had an operational NMD system, but Europe did not have a similar capability. Joschka Fisher, the German foreign minister has said that the proposed US missile shield would lead to "split security standards within the Nato alliance".
3. Justifying Space Missions
The decision to initiate or progress on space projects will usually involve considering their benefits, costs and risks. Any discussion of the ‘worthiness’ of a project should include one or more of the following fundamental questions:
Of these the first four may involve financial questions, the final will involve political appraisal and the possible implications of international treaties. However, the first three may also involve some ethical considerations, especially when there may be some danger to life (human or other) or the environment (of space, the Earth or some other body).
In 1999 the Interdisziplinäre Arbeitsgruppe Naturwissenschaft, Technik und Sicherheit (IANUS) of the Technische Universitat Darmstadt (TUD), peace groups from Darmstadt, Mutlangen and the Global Network against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space jointly organised a conference on "Space Use and Ethics - Criteria for the Assessment of Future Space Projects". The conference took place at TUD in Darmstadt, Germany from 3-5 March [16]. At this conference Jürgen Scheffran [17] suggested that the worthiness of science and technology projects should be evaluated by considering:
Scheffran also suggests that we should also ask:
Very often these are quite different groups of people. In the 21st century, space technology should contribute to solving conflicts and problems on Earth. In this context, he suggested that future space projects should:
We may find these criteria extremely useful when judging and/or prioritising future space missions.
4. Summary & Personal Perspective
In the above I have attempted to show that the military, commercial and scientific endeavors in space are closely linked and that the military requirements predominate. There is not space to cover other important areas such as the growing environmental concerns over the exploitation of natural resources of the Earth and heavenly bodies. Many authors have suggested that billions of dollars worth of metals, fuels and other resources that are rapidly disappearing from Earth, can be found and extracted from the Moon, the other planets and asteroids of the solar system (e.g. [18]). We will need to plunder other worlds once we have exhausted our own.
Is it not more sensible and more ethical to treat our own world carefully and responsibly, and to attempt to live sustainably on the Earth rather than to look for new worlds to exploit and feed our apparent insatiable greed for consumption? There is also much discussion concerning the possibility of finding life elsewhere in the Solar System. Could we be denying the opportunity for new life forms to develop and flourish on their own worlds by denying them their resources? Or could we be putting their survival at risk by crashing plutonium powered spacecraft into them?
In 1972 I started work on a postgraduate research project in the Physics Department at the University of York. The work involved measuring and analysing small variations in the Earth’s magnetic field (geomagnetic micropulsations) in an attempt to understand how hydromagnetic waves are generated and propagate in the near Earth environment. Interestingly, as part of this project we monitored earth currents using equipment that had originally been set up by the MoD to detect atmospheric nuclear explosions before international agreements banned them. Having obtained a D.Phil in Space Physics 1975 I was offered a post doctoral research fellowship at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey extending the research to investigate the interaction of the magnetic fields of the Earth and the Sun. In 1977 I returned to the University of York working as a post doctoral research fellow until 1979.
Then, at the age of 30 I decided it was time to get a steady job with a more secure future. Easier said than done – I did not find it easy to sell the particular skills I had developed during my short research career. There were a lot of jobs in defence but I was not keen to actually design or develop weapons systems. However, after a while I was offered a job as a Senior Scientific Officer in the Directorate of Scientific and Technical Intelligence at the Ministry of Defence. Here I was involved in tracking satellites and investigating and assessing the Soviet space program.
When I took up the appointment I thought of it as a truly defensive operation – I was not developing weapons – just gathering information. However, I gradually cam to realise that what I was doing was to always present a ‘worse case scenario’ to the politicians who were using this to justify the development and deployment of massively expensive weapons systems. There are more people involved in the business of building weapons than those who merely put them together. It occurred to me that the worse case was also being put to the politicians in the Soviet Union and United States. The military industrial complex is only too eager to pick up on any information that will help them obtain orders for huge projects. BMD - Star Wars – must be one of the biggest, most expensive, projects considered by humankind. I left the MoD in the same year that I joined.
It is very easy to convince yourself that the part you are playing in any project is acceptable and has nothing to do with the nasty bits being developed by someone else. In November 1998 Leicester Peace Action Group organised a conference on "Colonising space - Peaceful exploration or military adventure?" There were invited speakers from the Astronomy department of the local University and researchers and campaigners on the military uses of space. What struck me, and many other participants, was the refusal of some people to accept that there was a dark side to the area in which they worked. Most astronomy students and teachers seemed unaware of and unconcerned about the military activities in space. They did not think it was anything to do with them – and did not want to believe or to consider the fact that these activities are going on.
Leicester will soon be the home of the new National Space Centre which is to be a major educational resource for teaching young people about space. Karl Grossman was also a speaker at the 1998 conference and urged that some area be set aside to show the problems associated with military activity and commercial exploitation. As every part of the new Challenger Centre is to be modeled on the original in the US – this seems unlikely to happen.
Of course not all space projects are harmful. There are many astronomy and physics experiments that are aimed entirely at increasing our knowledge and understanding of the universe and these rightly capture the imagination of enthusiasts and the general public. Astronomy and space exploration are fascinating and challenging areas in which to work. However, we must be careful who we associate with in space related projects. We have seen how many projects can either be taken over by the military or used to justify or deflect from associated military activities. If we do not believe this to be the right way to progress we must speak out against exploitation and false representation. We should, we must, refuse to participate in life threatening activities.
References