US military eyes space, opponents urge caution

WARRENTON, Virginia - US efforts to deploy weapons in space face major technical, budgetary and physical barriers, opponents warned this week, but military planners still have high hopes for the "high ground" of future wars.

Everett Dolman, a professor at the Air Force's School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, said he expected the White House to issue a new space policy next month that would underscore the military's determination to protect its existing space assets and maintain dominance of outer space.

Space was essential to how the US military fights wars, Dolman said, noting that satellites already helped relay communications among troops, provided intelligence and targeting data, and guided bombs to their destinations.

"We've crossed the threshold and we simply cannot step back," Dolman, a proponent of space weapons, told Reuters at a two-day Nuclear Policy Research Institute conference.

Dolman said the critical question was not whether the United States should weaponize space, but whether it could afford to allow other states to get a jump-start in this area.

He said work on several technologies -- including work on microsatellites that could be launched to target enemy satellites and satellite-jamming systems -- was far enough along that it could be declared operational within 18 months.

Anti-nuclear activist Helen Caldicott organised the conference about 50 miles outside Washington to discuss what she described as dangerous moves that could spark a new arms race in space, as well as jeopardising weather forecasting, communications satellites and other peaceful uses of space.

She raised concerns about US$130 billion ($185.76 billion) that had already been spent on missile defence, backed by strong corporate lobbying efforts, and said the outlays for space weapons could be astronomically higher, while health conditions and social programmes on earth continued to suffer.

Theresa Hitchens, director of the Centre for Defence Information, warned that further moves by the Pentagon to weaponize space would spur reactions from China and other countries which viewed such efforts as inherently belligerent.

Space weapons would be very risky, expensive and could potentially trigger an accidental nuclear war, she added.

Hui Zhang, a Chinese scholar at Harvard University, said China was already very concerned about US plans in space, and was likely to respond by building more warheads.

Dolman said weapons in space would be the natural progression of efforts to transform the US military, an initiative spearheaded by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

But scientists, including Theodore Postol of the Massachusetts of Technology, said the science behind even ground-based missile defence was uncertain.

He said enemy missiles could be hidden in balloons and accompanied by decoys, making it nearly impossible for the kill vehicle to pick out which 'point of light' to target.

Retired Air Force General Chuck Horner, a former head of US Space Command, agreed that the proposed layered missile defence programme would "not be as effective as we want it to be". Two tests of the ground-based missile defence system's interceptors failed recently due to hardware and software glitches, although the agency reported a fifth successful test of the sea-based missile defence system in February.

Dolman said most scientists agreed that ground-based missile defence would not work as currently conceived, but said a future space-based missile defence networked to other sensors could make it easier to find enemy missiles among decoys.

The US Missile Defence Agency in February said it shelved work on lightweight space-based missile interceptors, but Jeffrey Lewis, a University of Maryland researcher, said the 2006 budget still earmarked hundreds of millions of dollars for other weapons programmes that could be used in space.

There is a UN treaty banning orbiting weapons of mass destruction, but opponents said they believed the United States would not shy from withdrawing from that treaty, if necessary, just as it withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, so that it could begin deploying its initial layered missile defence shield.

- REUTERS