Dark Skies by Daniel Deudney

Author:Daniel Deudney [Deudney, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Arms Control and Space Weapons

The pursuit of arms control in space has been a prominent feature of the Space Age, and arms control measures are a significant part of the space political order. From the very beginning of the Soviet and American military space activities in the 1950s, arms controllers have sought restraints, both formal and informal. With the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, the superpowers agreed not to test nuclear weapons in space, and both sides built sophisticated surveillance systems to detect violations. Then, in the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, the superpowers and almost all other states produced a rudimentary constitution for outer space and agreed not to station nuclear weapons in space or to put any weapon on any celestial body.

Arms controllers have mirrored the error of the military space expansionists in not recognizing ballistic missiles as space weapons. A series of major bilateral agreements, the first and second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties (SALT I and II), the first and second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties (START I and II), the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, and then New START and Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT) are viewed by arms controllers as landmark measures restraining superpower nuclear arsenals. Yet it is often overlooked that these treaties do not typically directly limit nuclear weapons, only their “delivery vehicles,” the most important of which are ballistic missiles. Thus what is conventionally understood to be nuclear arms control is mainly ballistic missile space weapons arms control. These treaties did not specifically focus on nuclear weapons because they are small and thus easily hidden, objects whose numbers could not plausibly be monitored except through a highly intrusive surveillance of the complete stockpiles of fissile materials and the behemoth industrial facilities producing them. Arms controllers focused on ballistic missiles for precisely the same reason that military planners saw them as so attractive: their extreme speed and the great difficulty in intercepting them, as well as the ease of counting their numbers. Once these great drawdowns in nuclear forces are recognized as focused on ballistic missile space weapons, these arms control measures emerge as one of the most extensive and consequential actual space programs. This giant space program, hiding in plain sight, has the sole purpose of restraining the doubly dark space program of ballistic missile space weaponization, also hiding in plain sight, sitting at the center of the planet-spanning military complexes generated by the great Soviet-American rivalry.

Despite the centrality of ballistic missile space weapons in so-called nuclear arms control, thinking about complete bans on ballistic missiles has had a remarkably underdeveloped role in arms control agendas. But some have proposed comprehensive restraints, or “zero ballistic missiles” (ZBM).17 In one simple step, a ZBM regime would roll back the acceleration of violence, lower escalatory crisis pressures, reduce first-strike fears, and render ballistic missile defense moot. A further attraction of a ZBM regime is its ready verifiability because clandestine testing of ballistic missiles is extremely difficult. As hypersonic missiles have come onto the horizon

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.