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U.S. Blocks PAROS Treaty at UN

Alice Slater
Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, New York

This article originally appeared in the Summer/ Fall 2008 issue of Space Alert!, published by the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space.

Each fall in the UN General Assembly, every country in the world votes to negotiate a treaty on the Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space (PAROS) — except one. Our own. The United States stands alone as the only member state annually voting ‘NO’ on the PAROS resolution. (Israel abstains.)

With the other 166 nations of the earth determined to prevent war in the heavens, the U.S. is essentially in an arms race with itself. Indeed, in 2006, Russia argued during the PAROS debate that if all states were to observe a prohibition on space weaponization, there would be no arms race in space. But U.S. has opposition has only intensified. When Russia and China — which have always been strong supporters of PAROS — submitted a draft treaty banning space weapons at the UN Conference on Disarmament this past February, the U.S. dismissed the proposal out of hand, characterizing it as “a diplomatic ploy by the two nations to gain a military advantage,”

The U.S.’s revised “National Space Policy” (released in October 2006) formally opposes “the development of new legal regimes or other restrictions that seek to prohibit or limit U.S. access to or use of space.” To protect U.S. dominance in space, the policy goes on to assert that the U.S. will continue to “dissuade or deter others from impeding [its right to operate in space]… and deny, if necessary, adversaries the use of space capabilities hostile to U.S. national interests.” U.S. programs to “protect” its satellites and other spacecraft include some of the most aggressive technologies yet to be unleashed on the international community, including:

• Micro-satellites to stalk and destroy other nation’s satellites

• Evolutionary Air and Space Global Laser Engagement (EAGLE), a series of orbiting mirrors to direct beams from ground- or air-based lasers at space targets

• The ground-based Kinetic Energy Anti- Satellite Weapon, to shoot down satellites with missiles, and the Kinetic Energy Interceptor, a missile ‘defense’ system that could double as an anti-satellite weapon

But as we witnessed with StratCom’s shoot-down of the falling satellite last February, the U.S.’s so-called missile ‘defense’ program — with which we are threatening Russia from installations in Eastern Europe, and China through our joint theater-missile ‘defense’ programs with Japan — has an offensive mission as well. While based on land and sea, they can be used to attack spacebased assets from the earth without actually being in orbit. Many of them travel through space to reach their targets and are designed with ‘dual-use’ characteristics, enabling them to destroy space assets as well as ballistic missiles.

In introducing the Russian-Chinese draft treaty last February, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, noted:

It is well known that there is inseparable relationship between strategic offensive and defensive armaments... The desire to acquire an anti-missile ‘shield’ while dismantling the ‘sheath’ where the nuclear ‘sword’ is kept is extremely dangerous. And if one also places on the balance pan the ‘global lightning strike’ concept providing for striking with nuclear and conventional strategic means targets in any point of the Globe in a matter of an hour after a relevant decision has been made, the risks for strategy stability and predictability become more than obvious. [All of the threats Lavrov referenced — missile defense, space dominance, full-spectrum global strike utilizing both conventional or nuclear weapons — are of course StratCom missions.]

U.S. efforts to dominate and control the military use of space also block progress on nuclear disarmament. There are some 26,000 nuclear weapons on our planet — 25,000 of them in the U.S. and Russia — with thousands of bombs poised at hair-trigger alert, ready to fire in minutes. It was the 1972 Anti- Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) that ended an upwardly-spiraling nuclear arms race when the U.S. and Russia agreed that a missile shield is a provocation to the other side to build more nuclear-armed missiles to overcome the shield. START II, ratified by the U.S. in 1996, limited each side to 3,500 longrange missiles. Russia delayed approval until 2000 due to a series of aggressive U.S. acts — the expansion of NATO up to Russia’s border, the unauthorized bombing of Iraq, the bombing of Yugoslavia without Security Council approval.

Putin then asked for START III talks to reduce long-range missiles from 3,500 to 1,500 or even 1,000. This forward-looking proposal was accompanied by a stern caveat that all Russian offers would be off the table — including START II ratification — if the U.S. proceeded with plans to build a National Missile Defense (NMD) in violation of the ABM Treaty. Astoundingly, U.S. diplomatic ‘talking points’ leaked by Russia to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists revealed that the Clinton Administration was assuring the Russians that they had nothing to fear from our proposed NMD, as long as they kept 2,500 weapons in their arsenal at launch-onwarning, hair-trigger alert. Despite Putin’s offer to cut stockpiles to 1,000 warheads, we assured Russia that with 2,500 warheads they would be able to overcome our NMD shield and deliver an “annihilating counterattack.” Once Bush took office in 2001, negotiations collapsed altogether, as the U.S. withdrew from the ABM Treaty to pursue its master plan “to dominate and control the military use of space, to protect US interests and investments”.

This fall, PAROS will again be addressed at the United Nations, as it has been since 1985. While the world has the 1967 Outer Space Treaty banning weapons of mass destruction in space, a PAROS ban on conventional space weapons is waits to be implemented. And there are no agreements covering the existing militarization of outer space that would enable the use of these space assets for use in wars on earth. Militaries can now rely on satellites for command and control, communication, monitoring, early warning, and navigation using Global Positioning Systems satellites. These space functions are used to direct bombing raids or orchestrate “prompt global strikes” on earth, defined by the United States as “the ability to control any situation or defeat any adversary action across the range of military operations.” Indeed it has been said that the First Gulf War was the first war conducted from space. “It was the first war in which space systems really played a major role in terms of the average soldier, sailor, airman and Marine,” said Lt. Gen. Roger DeKok, vice commander of Air Force Space Command. “This was the first time that space affected the way our troops fought in the battle.”

Given the urgency of the task before us, the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space has formed a “PAROS Working Group” (in which Nebraskans for Peace is represented). Our goal is to focus on the upcoming discussion on PAROS and to work with our allies around the world, so that we can bring international pressure to bear on the U.S. to support PAROS and to take up the urgent offer from the world community to ‘keep space for peace.’

For more information, contact Ray Acheson at ray@reachingcriticalwill.org.