Weapons in Space by Karl Grossman

Author:Karl Grossman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781609803209
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2011-01-03T21:00:00+00:00

INTERNAL OPPOSITION

There are Democrats, of course, emphatically against the U.S. weaponization of space by the United States. One has been former U.S. Senator Charles Robb of Virginia, defeated for re-election in 2000, who declared in 1999: “The United States and other nations have rightly avoided placing weapons in space.… A space-based arms race would be essentially irreversible.… It defies reason to assume that nations would sit idle while the United States invests billions of dollars in weaponizing space, leaving them at an unprecedented disadvantage.… Once this genie is out of the bottle, there is no way to put it back in. We could never afford to bring all these systems back to Earth, and destroying them would be equally unfeasible, because the billions of pieces of space debris would jeopardize commercial satellites and manned missions.” Moreover, said Robb, himself a former military officer, if space becomes a war zone “the fog of war would reach an entirely new density.”103

And in the House of Representatives, leading opponents of Star Wars include Cynthia McKinney of Georgia, Lynn Woolsey of California and Dennis Kucinich of Ohio.

“Leave Star Wars to the movies,” declared McKinney on the House floor April 11, 2000 as the three made an effort to stop the missile defense program. She spoke of the tens of billions of dollars that have been “been squandered on Star Wars. Now they have changed the name to National Missile Defense, but it is the same thing.”104

“The U.S. Space Command calls for expanded war fighting capabilities in outer space. The guiding words in this country,” said Kucinich, “ought to be ‘thy will be done on Earth as it is in heaven,’ not ‘war be done in heaven as it is on Earth.’ Let us work for peace on Earth, not war in space.”105

Later that week, Kucinich gave the keynote address at the 2000 international meeting of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space. “We know that moving forward with a national missile defense system will set the stage for the advancement and proliferation of nuclear weapons in space,” he declared. “And we know that once we continue down this road, we’re going to be locked into funding an industry that makes missiles, and anti-missiles, and creates policies to promote the use of missiles, and more spending on missiles.”106

He asked what happened to the “Cold War benefit. There’s only a restless, ceaseless arms race which rides the newest technological wave, to continue to drain our national resources, to continue to create fear in America, to continue to create fear abroad, to continue to make the world less safe, and to continue to drive our national consciousness downward.”107

Kucinich spoke of the opposition of the U.S. in the UN to the resolution seeking to prevent an arms race in outer space by reaffirming the Outer Space Treaty. “It’s my belief that the United States must sign on, and send a message to the world that space is for peace, not war.… Unfortunately, there are policy makers who are aimed at having the country make a statement totally the opposite.

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.