US Weaponizing Space in Bid to Launch Arms Race

Finian CUNNINGHAM

While the spats between President Trump and other NATO leaders at the rancorous 70th summit garnered most media attention, barely noticed was the alliance’s announcement to make “space an operational domain”.

The move represents a grave assault on existing treaties forbidding the weaponization of space. The NATO announcement is doubly insidious because it gives the appearance of a multilateral acceptance of US attempts to open up the “final frontier” for militarization. A move which is far from acceptable. In fact, illegal, under international law.

Earlier this year, Donald Trump unveiled a new branch of the US armed forces, Space Command, separate from the Air Force. “Spacecom will defend America’s vital interests in space, the next war-fighting domain, and I think that’s pretty obvious to everybody. It’s all about space,” said Trump at a White House ceremony.

It is the first time that a new branch of the US armed forces has been created since 1947 when US Air Force was created out of the Army. The other existing armed services are the Marine Corps, Navy and Coast Guard. Legislation is currently going through Congress which will authorize the president’s order for setting up the new branch, to be known henceforth as Space Force.

All this is happening with barely any public debate or scrutiny. Even though it represents a dramatic escalation of military dimensions. To the existing domains of land, air and sea the United States under Trump is pushing ahead for weaponization of space. As the “war-fighting” rationale of the president makes clear, the development is explicitly about leveraging new military strike potential.

US weaponization of space has been underway for decades, going back to the “star wars” initiative of the Reagan administration in the 1980s and during the GW Bush presidency in the 2000s. However, Trump is taking the program to a whole new level by implementing a separate dedicated Space Force.

This is in spite of the existing UN-ratified 1967 Outer Space Treaty which prohibits any introduction of weapons, including nuclear weapons, into space.

“States shall not place nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on celestial bodies or station them in outer space in any other manner,” reads the treaty, which provides the basic legal framework for international space law.

Russia and China have been consistently strong advocates for upholding the treaty.

Yet proponents of the US Space Force routinely claim that America is being threatened by Russian and Chinese advances in space military technology. It is not clear on what basis these American claims are made.

Republican Alabama Representative Mike Rogers is quoted by Space News as saying: “We have allowed China and Russia to become our peers, not our near peers and that’s unacceptable.”

But like so many other US claims about Russia and China supposedly threatening American interests, there is little or no evidence presented. The claims rely on ideological prejudice and/or a cynical lobbying service for the military-industrial complex. Going into space will convey billion-dollar contracts to US aerospace corporations.

Indeed, there is a resonance with US claims made in the 1950s and 60s of a “missile gap” which alleged back then that the Soviet Union was outpacing America’s arsenal of strategic nuclear weapons. The putative missile gap was invoked as a pretext for greatly expanding the US arsenal, thereby creating an international arms race, only for the so-called missile gap to be found out years later to be a fiction of American scaremongering. Cynically, that fiction was deliberately propagated to the American public in order to provide a tax-payer-funded pork-barrel production line for the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex.

The same process seems to be underway with Trump’s much-vaunted Space Force.

There is another strategic aspect to this American “weaponization of the heavens”. That is, to force Russia and China into an arms race which Washington calculates would be economically ruinous for Moscow and Beijing. What’s at stake here is a pivotal struggle between Russia and China’s vision of a multipolar world and Washington’s desire to be the globe’s hegemonic uni-power. If the US can break Russia and China economically then it wins this era-defining struggle. Launching an arms race is Washington’s gambit for taking down Russia and China.

The precedent is the arms race in the 1980s under Reagan which brought the Soviet Union to collapse. Because of Washington’s presumed right to print endless amounts of dollars and rack up seemingly limitless national debt, the US is waging that it will be the last man standing in an arms race with Russia and China.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly said that Russia will not fall into the trap of unleashing an arms race. At a recent meeting in Sochi with his top defense officials, Putin emphasized the imperative need to focus on efficiency in weapon systems. Russia’s latest-generation of hypersonic missiles which apparently can evade any US defense shield – despite the latter costing trillions of dollars to develop – is one example.

Nevertheless, if – and it is a big if – the US manages to develop space weaponry, the pressure will be on Russia and China to respond in kind to counter a whole new threat level. That would mean both nations diverting resources into another realm of weaponry instead of developing their economies.

The US Space Force has to be seen in the wider context of Washington unravelling the entire system of global arms controls. The US withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty in 2002 was followed by its withdrawal from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty last year. The Trump administration is moving towards scrapping New START in 2021, the third and last nuclear-arms control treaty.

There is an unconscionable effort by US governments over many years to incite a new arms race. Going into outer space is part of that effort. It is a gross violation of international law and the United Nations by the US to open up a new frontier for military dominance. And the US has utilized the 29-nation NATO alliance to rubber-stamp its criminal weaponization of space.

Finian CUNNINGHAM

Former editor and writer for major news media organizations. He has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages

US Reprehensibly Inciting New Global Arms Race

Strategic Culture Foundation

Russia and China are right to condemn the testing this week of an INF-busting new missile by the US. Washington is brazenly jeopardizing global security under the usual cynical guise of “defense”.

Washington launched a ground-based cruise missile off the coast of California. It was reportedly a Tomahawk-type nuclear-capable warhead, but the Pentagon said it was conventionally armed. The projectile apparently succeeded in hitting its target after more than 500 kilometers of flight. The testing of such a missile would have been banned by the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty which the US officially withdrew from on August 2.

The INF, first signed in 1987, banned the testing and deployment of missiles within the range of 500-5,500 kms.

It is inconceivable that the latest weapon could not have been in the long-term works for development prior to the three-week period since the INF was abandoned. In others words, the abrogation of the treaty was long-anticipated by Washington, which belies US claims over recent months that it was crashing out of the INF due to alleged Russian violations. The US wanted out of the treaty. Now that it is freed from restriction, the prompt deployment of the cruise weapon off California seems to confirm the ulterior agenda.

Previously, Pentagon chief Mark Esper indirectly admitted this ulterior agenda when he told Senate hearings that the purpose for scrapping the INF was for the US to be able to confront China.

This week Esper said the missile testing was aimed at sending Beijing a message that the “US is capable of deterring China’s bad behavior”.

So, let’s have some honesty here. Washington just ripped up an important arms-control treaty for global security, not because of alleged Russian violations, but rather because the US wants to give itself a free hand to expand its short and medium-range arsenal to challenge China.

Indeed, Esper also remarked during a recent trip to Australia that the US intends to deploy INF-type ground-based missiles in Asia.

Admittedly, China is reckoned to have an arsenal of short and medium-range missiles. Beijing was not a party to the INF, so technically it is not in breach of its restrictions. But a crucial distinction is that such Chinese weapons do not pose a threat to the US mainland. Whereas US intentions of moving similar ballistic warheads to land bases in Asia do pose an imminent threat to China, as well as to Russia.

The US and its NATO allies claim they do not want to start a new global arms race. Washington says it is not planning to deploy INF-type warheads in Europe. However, the type of launcher used this week and which is already deployed in Romania and, it is believed, in Poland as well, could be used sometime in the near future to fire nuclear-capable missiles at Russia.

Washington is thus recklessly shifting the balance of power and undermining the global architecture for security against nuclear war.

Both Russia and China have deplored the risk of a new arms race being incited by the US.

Perhaps this kind of arms race is exactly what Washington is seeking, despite claims to the contrary. The nefarious calculation is that Russia and China will be diverted from economic development by being forced into responding in kind to new threats from the US.

After all, with its presumed license to rack up never-ending national debt, American strategic planners may feel that they can impose crippling economic costs on geopolitical rivals Russia and China.

The Chinese government said it best this week when it commented that the US “must give up its Cold War mentality”.

The endemic premise in Washington is that Russia, China and other states are mortal threats to the US. The official American view of the world is relentlessly paranoid about enemy states, which are allegedly harboring malign designs to the destroy the US.

Of course such cynical, nihilistic thinking is necessitated by the fundamental operating need of US capitalism and its addiction to the military-industrial complex. War is good, peace is bad, so goes the Orwellian American credo, albeit never outrightly stated as such. If the US were to somehow make peace with the world and enter into normal friendly international relations, then its $700-billion-plus annual spending on military would cease to exist from lack of “justification”, and with that would follow the calamitous implosion of its militarized capitalist economy.

An arms race for the US state planners is like finding a drug-fix for a junkie. It is damnable that Washington is tearing up arms control treaties and jeopardizing global security in order to gratify its dysfunctional systematic dependence on insecurity, tension, conflict and ultimately war.

The undoing of arms controls treaties by the US, first the ABM in 2002, then the INF this year, next perhaps the New Start treaty expiring in 2021, is reprehensible. But what is more reprehensible is the underlying ideology that impels that. American citizens have to address that root ideological disease, otherwise the world will continually be in peril of war.

US missile treaty withdrawal sparks global nuclear arms race

A half-century after the Cuban Missile crisis that brought human civilization to within a hair’s breadth of destruction, Washington is fueling a global nuclear standoff that is, if anything, even more dangerous.

Andre Damon, National Secretary of the US-based International Youth and Students for Social Equality, has more on this.

Last month, the White House announced that the United States would leave the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which prohibits the deployment of land-based missiles with ranges of up to 5,000 miles.

Military strategists and think tanks have made clear that the Pentagon has plans to deploy short- and medium-range nuclear-capable missiles in Eastern Europe, as well as on islands off the Chinese coast. Earlier this month, the Pentagon said it has accelerated its plans to deploy weapons prohibited by the treaty, declaring it “will start those steps on the systems that they couldn't before.”

Just recently, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Russia would retaliate proportionately “and asymmetrically” to any deployment of US missiles in Europe, making clear that it would target US launch facilities as well as “command centers,” including Washington and possibly European capitals. Putin declared that if the United States deployed such missiles, they would be able to “reach Moscow in just 10–12 minutes,” a situation that would be “dangerous for Russia.”
Putin warned that the growing stand-off increasingly resembles the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The present situation has definite parallels to that event, which was triggered by the stationing of American Jupiter ballistic missiles in Turkey in 1961. In response, the Soviet Union stationed its own medium-range nuclear missiles in Cuba, just over 100 miles from the Florida Coast. Numerous participants have attested to the fact that nuclear war was narrowly averted.

US plans for deploying missiles in violation of the INF treaty are already well advanced. In his speech, Putin said that the US missile defense systems installed in Poland and Romania were fully capable of launching medium-range tomahawk missiles armed with a nuclear payload. While Washington’s claims that Russia is operating in violation of the INF treaty remain largely unsubstantiated, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists backs Putin’s claim, declaring that “publicly available information makes it clear that the US Aegis-based systems in Eastern Europe, if equipped with cruise missiles, would indeed violate the INF.”

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists added that, “If the Aegis-based systems in Eastern Europe were supplied with American cruise missiles—either the existing Tomahawk or a new missile that Russia claims the United States has been developing—they would become fearsome offensive forces, staged on the frontiers of Russia. And there would be little way for Russia to know whether Aegis systems were loaded with missile defense interceptors or nuclear-armed cruise missiles.”
When pressed on whether the American “missile defense” sites were capable of firing nuclear cruise missiles, the Pentagon has responded in the negative, declaring that the facilities’ software prevented them from doing so. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has called this “a false assertion that is incompatible with the engineering design of the system.”

To turn these facilities into launch platforms for cruise missiles would, in other words, require little more than a software update.

A “proportional” response by Russia in violation of the INF would entail placing ground-based missiles within a few hundred miles of the US border: a largely unfeasible project. Putin made clear that in response to any moves to deploy ground-launched cruise missiles, Russia would be prepared to implement an “asymmetric” response: placing hypersonic missiles on ships and submarines within a few hundred miles of the US border.

Putin said, “With speeds we are capable of, we can place our ships far away from the territorial waters or even the exclusive economic zone of a certain nation. They can be in neutral waters, far in the ocean”. “Nobody can forbid naval ships and submarines to be there.”
In response to American plans to make Europe into a firing range for nuclear missiles, Russia is threatening to turn America’s Eastern Seaboard into a high-stakes skirmish line, in which submarines, ships and aircraft armed with nuclear missiles jostle for position just a few hundred miles from one of the most densely populated coastlines in the world.

And this will be just one theater of the multipolar nuclear dystopia imagined by the Trump White House, with a similar standoff going on every day in the seas off the Chinese coast.

To make matters worse, all of this will play out not with today’s ballistic weapons, but with hypersonic missiles traveling at 25 times the speed of sound, with a “decision window” of just two or three minutes to determine whether a detected missile launch is a test, a false alarm or a full-scale thermonuclear assault, massively raising the chances of a deadly miscalculation with billions of lives on the line.

This catastrophic state of affairs was set into motion with the dissolution of the USSR, out of which Putin himself emerged. Nearly three decades ago, the end of the USSR was greeted with a wave of triumphalism and the declaration that, with the global victory of "liberal democracy," nuclear war had become a thing of the past.

What followed, however, was not a “peace dividend,” but rather unending wars in Iraq, Serbia, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. Now, with the Pentagon’s doctrine of “strategic competition,” the US is preparing for a full-scale war against nuclear-armed “great powers” like Russia and China.
In the aftermath of the dissolution of the USSR, the United States and NATO pushed their forces hundreds of miles to the east, to the very borders of Russia, intent on reducing the country to the status of a semi-colony.

In response, the Putin government, expressing the social interests of the Russian oligarchy, is pursuing a bankrupt policy. Incapable of making any appeal to anti-war sentiment within the United States or globally, the Kremlin wavers between cowardice and wild adventurism. Putin makes fruitless appeals to his American “partners” to come to their senses, while at the same time making bellicose nuclear threats, such as his provocative announcement that Russia will target Washington with nuclear weapons.

The Trump administration is the most aggressive purveyor of the global nuclear arms race, but the process is universal. A recent report by the Munich Security Conference declares that “the role of nuclear weapons” is “growing.” It added that beyond the US and Russia, all of the nine nuclear weapons states are adding to or upgrading their arsenals, apparently intent on gaining an edge "in a period of new uncertainty.”

In Germany, which had previously eschewed the development of nuclear weapons, the demand within the ruling elite for an independent nuclear force is growing stronger every day. For his part, Trump is continuing and intensifying the policies of his predecessor, Barack Obama, the candidate of “hope and change,” who launched a trillion-dollar nuclear modernization program to produce “low-yield,” “usable” nuclear weapons that have started to roll off the assembly lines this year.

The universality of the new global arms race makes clear that it is not the outcome of the political conjuncture of one or another country, but an expression of a universal process gripping the crisis-ridden world order. The so-called ruling elites see their own vested interests in war, plunder and conquest, together with the promotion xenophobia. By the way, where is the root cause of war, dictatorship and social inequality? How can we deter and practically prevent devastating wars followed by those in the White House or elsewhere in Tel Aviv ruled by bloodthirsty rulers? Yes, something needs to be done soon.