Copyright © 2003 The Bookpress.
Missile Defense Before and After 9/11
revisions 6/3/03
Stuart Davis
Fatal Choice
By Richard Butler
Westview
[2001] 175 pp., $22.00, cloth
The New Nuclear Danger: George W. Bush's Military-Industrial Complex
Dr. Helen Caldicott
The New Press [2002]
263 pp., $14.95
An Evening with Dr. Helen Caldicott. Ithaca College, 17 November 2002
A FreeAirProduction
CD, $5.00
Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War
Frances FitzGerald
Simon and Schuster [2000]
592 pp., $30.00, cloth
Weapons in Space
Karl Grossman
Open Media Pamphlet Series [2001]
80 pp., $6.95, paper
When American Flight 77 hit the Pentagon at 9:43 that September morning, the crash interrupted a conference in Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's office on missile defense. (So Newsweek reported 1; other sources made it a routine intelligence briefing.) The subject was not dropped in the urgency of defending the homeland against airborne or pedestrian terrorists but only adjourned. Within weeks Congress voted to give the President most of the $8.3 billion he had sought for this cause, and the business press had reason to celebrate "the Good News on Missile Defense" 2 and to congratulate the nation on its good sense: since September 11, opined Rupert Murdoch's Daily Standard in late October, "in the two places where it matters most --Congress and the minds of the American people --support for missile defense has, if anything, increased." 3
The Bush administration needed no reinforcement, having never lost the faith. Defense strategists of the Perle-Rumsfeld-Cheney stamp have cherished Missile Defense (hereafter MD) ever since Reagan days, first as a counterforce to arms control negotiations and more lately as a tool for reinstating Cold War antagonisms in a unipolar world. Rumsfeld chaired two pro-MD panels before taking office, the first espousing the "rogue states" theory of nuclear conflict during the Clinton administration's lapse of confidence in MD and the second threatening a "space Pearl Harbor" if such initiatives waned. Bush campaigned on it; Powell promised to get on with it "as aggressively as possible" at his confirmation hearings; 4 and in late 2001 Bush announced the country's withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty between the U.S. and the Russians, long an article of international stability. The Defense Department's Nuclear Posture Review of January 2002 made MD the centerpiece of and fig leaf for its radical redefinition of U.S. strategic forces as a New Age warfighting force. 5 And when Bush announced the first "modest" deployment of ground-based interceptors in Alaska last December, he cited the 9-11 attacks as an example of the "unprecedented threats" that called for such a shield. Thus far the recent record.
"Modest" in cost and conception is something Missile Defense has never been, as Frances FitzGerald's dramatic and detailed history of "Star Wars" --the derisory sobriquet for MD, called the Strategic Defense Initiative under Ronald Reagan --makes clear, and modest it will never be, if Dr. Helen Caldicott's punchy new guidebook to nuclear threats old and new, of which MD is only one, proves reliable. (Her recorded talk at Ithaca College is even punchier in its language.) Americans have spent roughly eighty billion dollars on MD since 1983 without producing a "capable" weapons system, one without the dismal history of operational tests, many of them botched or cooked, conveniently chronicled at the Union of Concerned Scientists' website 6. The cost to international stability and confidence, writes veteran disarmament negotiator Richard Butler, has been big and will get bigger; the "fatal choice" of his title, for the U.S., is or was between shoring up and extending existing arms-control law and sabotaging the whole structure with proliferative measures like, for example, MD. But this is what our masters are committed to doing, in the face of resistance both popular and governmental from our traditional enemies (France and the U.K.) as well as our new friends (Russia and China), and most everyone else. Further, Caldicott and Grossman contend, current MD plans are a means to another means, the weaponization and nuclearization of space, for the sake of exploiting the stars and ruling the world. Much of the world, predictably, fears this thing and hates us for trying to build it; what drives it on into the new century?
The question gains piquancy from a fact emphasized by Caldicott's title and FitzGerald's narrative: so much of this has happened before, and if the first iteration bordered on farce, the new one brings tragedy much closer. Upon Ronald Reagan's jaw-dropping announcement of March 1983 that the U.S. would research and develop a shield against hostile nuclear missiles there followed a cycle of initiatives, hyperbolic projections, learned debates over the rival merits of unproven technologies, clashes in Congress, palace plots, treaty reinterpretations, and aborted international arms negotiations. Bush I maintained the Star Wars commitment without materially enlarging it; the Clintonites, after a few years of downsizing, yielded to the pressure of Republicans and scandals and funded a MD development whose deployment they left to the folks to come, and with their coming the cycle began anew.
There are differences, of course, and these introduce some necessary distinctions. From the first, the Reagan planners envisioned a space-based system comprising both kinetic interceptors like projectiles and directed-energy sources like lasers and particle beams that would shoot down enemy missiles in launch or boost phase or in mid-course trajectory or intercept them in terminal phase; it was from the first a "national" missile defense system promising protection to the continental U.S--an "astrodome defense," in FitzGerald's words. 7. The systems edging toward deployment in the nineties and the present decade are ground-based, targeting midcourse or terminal-phase missiles with kinetic projectiles alone, and although at least temporarily modest in scale, they are, because of their siting, no less "national" in principle than preceding plans; the ABM Treaty had to go because it prohibited such schemes. 8
Theatre defenses, in contrast, protect military assets in battle and have been in existence for decades--examples are the Aegis arms aboard the cruiser Vincennes that shot down an Iranian passenger jet during the Iran-Iraq war and the Patriot missiles that were believed (falsely, as it turned out) to have killed so many Scuds during the Gulf War--but these become strategic weapons when they are deployed against ballistic missiles, like the theatre defenses the U.S. is seeking to deploy in Japan, Korea, and perhaps Taiwan.
Yet these distinctions come to look arbitrary fast because both administrations, Reagan's and Bush's, have merged defenses of different types (and conveniently at different stages of realization) in "tiered" or "layered" combinations, and the Bush strategists, now released from the ABM treaty, have further obfuscated public awareness by fusing theatre and national defenses in one nominal program. So the grandiose scale of Reagan-era proposals, lost during the regimes of Bush I and Clinton, has returned in the strategic projections of Bush II--even while many of the technologies now contemplated are as iffy as the old ones. But that may not matter too much, because MD systems do most of their work in a kind of future tense, subjunctive mood, somewhere on the continuum between conception and deployment. Talk about (projection of, work on) such strategic weapons, being itself strategic, is therefore unstable as well as destabilizing, being calculated to darken counsel and enhance menace.
For who could keep his or her bearings in the alphabet salad or sandstorm of systems, each listed with its price tag and its principal contractors, in Helen Caldicott's sixth chapter? In addition to our old friend the Clinton-era Ground-Based Interceptor (GBI) with its Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle (EKV), lower-tier interceptors are commissioned for all three armed services: the Patriot PAC-3 for the Army, a Naval Area Defense, and such gadgets as AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System, already operational) and J-STARS (Joint Surveillance and Target Attack Radar System) for the Air Force. Upper-tier defenses include THAAD (Theatre High Altitude Area Defense) and the NTW (Naval Theater Wide) system, exceeded in technological sophistication by Airborne and Space Based Lasers (ABL and SBL) and all notionally coördinated by Battle Management/Command, Control, and Communications (BM/C3) systems driven by computers that may react to real or perceived threats instantaneously, eliminating human intervention.
Of course these systems, in their turn, will require early warning of hostile launches by ground--and space-based sensors with names like BMEWS, SBIRS-High, and SBIRS-Low--and so it goes. The beneficiaries? They are Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, TRW, United Technologies, and Northrop Grumman, and here is Caldicott's thumbnail of "the Lockheed Martin Presidency":
-
A belligerent and ill-informed president sits in the White House
(despite his perceived change of status since September 11, 2001),
controlled by his corporate staff intent on extracting as much
American tax money as they possibly can to build ever more exotic and
dangerous weapons.
For Caldicott, then, pure collusion explains much of this administration's weapons splurge, but with MD there is mystification as well. Like the incoming bodies MD is supposed to stop, it has been a moving target, hard to track and easy to misidentify, breaking into decoys and surrogates that spoof our critical faculties. Insofar as MD is one thing, it is less like a missile than a "MacGuffin," Alfred Hitchcock's name for "the deliberately mysterious plot objective--the non-point" of a film, in his biographer's words: in his own, "the gimmick if you will, or the papers the spies are after." 10 Does anyone remember what the uranium in the wine bottles in Notorious was for? Yes, but only because the picture appeared after Hiroshima and Nagasaki: if the U.S. had bombed the Japanese with marzipan, Notorious would still feature a brave girl and a dedicated man tragically divided in pursuit of an objective (what was it?) of overwhelming importance. Has anyone a clue about "the Process" in David Mamet's Spanish Prisoner? No, but the gimmick gives shape and force to a delicious intrigue while remaining, perhaps because remaining, perfectly opaque in itself. For our national and human story, MD is a similarly powerful source of motivation and mystery, but between fiction and history there is a small difference. Stories end, and we forget their pretexts. History goes on and has to absorb all the ruinous and unpredictable MacGuffins forced on its plots by statesman and scientist, emperor and clown. In fiction, MacGuffins evaporate rent-free; in history they drive deeper scripts with comic or devastating consequences.
In this one case, funnily enough, there may have been a crossover. As FitzGerald reports, at least the packaging of Reagan's Star Wars may have come from the MacGuffin of another Hitch film. 11 In Torn Curtain (1966), an American scientist played by Paul Newman pretends to defect to East Germany in order to learn from a Communist scientist the missing step in the development of the "Gamma Five" project. Gamma Five, as it happens, is "a defense weapon that will make all offensive weapons obsolete, and thereby abolish the terror of nuclear war," and, in a mad duel of blackboard-scribbling, Newman fools his German colleague into revealing the secret. What was all this about? How would it work? Who cares? Newman and his assistant-fiancée Julie Andrews bring the missing secret back to the West and live happily, etc.
But not, perhaps, without laying the eggs of Star Wars in the brain of film star Ronald Reagan, who seventeen years later called upon "the scientific community in this country, who gave us nuclear weapons... to give us the means of rendering these weapons impotent and obsolete." 12 (It was the scientists, you see, who did it. 12a) The Reagan of FitzGerald's study is an actor-narrator of rare skill and detachment willing to sell any story given the right script, and Star Wars, whatever its real inspiration, provided the right script. FitzGerald's story begins with the visit, reported by an early biographer, of presidential candidate Reagan to NORAD headquarters at Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, where he discovered with dismay that "we have spent all that money and have all that equipment, and there is nothing we can do to prevent a nuclear missile from hitting us." The official version of the tale leads Reagan, "the dreamer, the nuclear abolitionist, the naive", 13 straight from this epiphany to the Star Wars speech of March 1983, which took most military and civilian advisors by surprise and spurred the funding of SDI in 1985 and years following, then to the cultivation of almost-available technologies, and of course to the breakdown at Reykjavik of negotiations that would, but for Reagan's attachment to SDI, have resulted in treaty arrangements scheduling the elimination of all ballistic missiles (by one account) or of all strategic arms (by another). Despite these peripeties--so goes the received story--the ending was happy; Reagan's defense budget and his commitment to Star Wars spent the adversary into the ground and the Soviet empire (and the Cold War) just fell apart.
FitzGerald deconstructs every episode in this tale without losing respect for its formal appeal or its roots in American national ideology. The Sovs weren't spent down, only alarmed enough by the prospect of weapons in space to link their every disarmament proposal to U.S. adherence to the ABM treaty--until Gorbachev lost his fear of what he came to believe an impossible project. Consensus disintegrated at Reykjavik more through imprecision and bluff than from an American commitment to SDI, although that was an element. The necessary technologies were in no way available to the United States, despite the claims made for exotic gadgets like Dr. Edward Teller's X-ray laser, a "space-fed" radar, and an electromagnetic "rail gun" for shooting space projectiles, all of which proved worthless. At its best, Star Wars was "a program in search of technologies for an undesigned system at a price the nation might be willing to pay." 14
What was really going on in the early and middle Reagan years, she shows, was more complex, a kind of massive politics-driven rhetorical event that grew naturally out of the dynamics of Cold-War strategy. Campaigning in 1979-80 with no foreign policy but an archaic anti-communism, Reagan met up with the agenda of the Committee on the Present Danger, a caucus of hawks who perceived between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. a large window of missile vulnerability. Once in office, the Reaganites adopted yet more belligerent crisis rhetoric, achieved the largest peacetime arms buildup in American history, and continued to campaign on the Soviet threat in 1984.
Star Wars, as it happens, matured later rather than earlier in the conceptual arsenal of an administration peopled by "hard-line defense intellectuals" like Richard Perle and Fred Iklé and the national security advisor Richard Allen. FitzGerald shows that the initiative addressed at least three problems faced by the government: first, purely strategic puzzlement over how to make the MX missile, the next wonder weapon in the U.S. arsenal, "survivable" against a first strike from the enemy; second, how to complicate plans for the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, on the horizon in 1984; and finally, what to do about the nuclear Freeze, a broad-based peace movement with vast popular and international support, that had been gaining head from 1980 to 1984.
Leaving the ill-fated MX aside (but responding to the issue of survivability), Star Wars deflected and deferred START I and, FitzGerald suggests, succeeded in coöpting much of the popular support for the Freeze. But as the solution to a strategic problem or window of vulnerability, Star Wars was elegantly and symmetrically vacuous: "the solution did not exist, but, then, the problem did not either, so in that sense it was a perfect solution." 15
Such a thing is a hoax, but it gains ideological body--and MacGuffinish efficacy--when seen as an imaginary solution to real problems that have been systematically disguised. The real problem faced in 1983 by the nuclear powers was the existence of large arsenals of weapons whose use was morally lunatic but whose acquisition and maintenance by adversaries was to a point instrumentally rational. The baseline doctrine from which nuclear strategy started in those years was deterrence through the threat of massive retaliation that would result in Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD); it took shape in the sixties on the reliable assumption that nuclear war was unwinnable. MAD was not, FitzGerald rightly insists, an orthodoxy among defense planners ignored only by a few right-wing know-nothings; an alternative doctrine of "warfighting," according to which one adversary could win a nuclear war that was less than total, had always had proponents, and the situation addressed by MAD was unstable in its stability, given to "threat inflations" and to arms buildups of greater or lesser symmetry that could never reach closure, only reach toward it. What was different about the new Reaganite warfighters, it seems clear, was that they projected their own intentions on their adversary and then resorted to the fiction of a perfect missile shield as the only alternative--one which would, of course, have to prove invulnerable in order to be worth anything and which in its MacGuffinly way became for a time the dominant theme of striving and conflict.
Now go back to Cheyenne Mountain: what candidate for the presidency in 1980 could possibly have been unaware that, on the rules of the balance of terror, no superpower could or should do very much to "prevent a nuclear missile from hitting [it]"? What was the mindset or world view of those who insisted that nuclear security at the time lay not in a fairly even balance of offensive (and unthinkably destructive) weapons but a special set of defensive weapons magically exempt from the competition?
In fact, there were crucial cracks in the Star Wars rationale as it developed. Was the missile shield meant to shield populations (in which case it had to be total) or to shield other armaments (in which case partial coverage was O.K.)? Was it meant to protect the nation against a first strike only--or could it work against a "second" launched by the enemy in retaliation against a first one from the U.S., thus enabling a "third" (from the U.S.)? Or was it, in fact, a gamble on catastrophe and not a defense at all that the Star Warriors really wanted? That is consistent with the world view on which FitzGerald thinks Star Wars was based. It comprised an evangelical Protestantism that remained middle America's core religion, with its apocalyptic thinking and its polarization of the world into forces of darkness and light, and an "imperial isolationism" that led American conservatives of a Midwestern strain to want to be both omnipotent and remote from the objects of their power. Such a contradiction, says FitzGerald, cried out for "some magical, or symbolic, thinking... [t]he idea of exerting power at a distance, or exerting power while remaining isolated." 16
Of course the answer was Star Wars, and its motives survive in our present-day unilateralists, some of whom have long histories. Even then it was Richard Perle, an assistant secretary of defense under Reagan, who rejoiced in the "Star Wars" epithet that stung his president: "Why not?" he asked. "It's a good movie. Besides, the good guys won." 17 And even now the President has chosen to accompany his unfolding warfighting initiatives (the War on Terror, the revival of MD, the assault on Iraq) with a speech demonizing adversaries as an "axis of evil"--just as Reagan anticipated his announcement of Star Wars by denouncing the communist bloc as an "evil empire" (in a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals in early March of 1983). 18 Is there, for this persistent mentality, very much difference between a desire for universal domination and a nostalgia for the apocalyptic possibilities of the Cold War?
The MacGuffin of Missile Defense now serves both motives without contradiction. Caldicott argues that "first-strike winnable nuclear war is the real (secret?) agenda of Star Wars revitalization" but she also sees that it can create a new, consolidated adversary from Russia and China. Such a convergence becomes possible only on the half-suppressed principle that MD, whether a first-strike stalking horse or not, is everywhere and always an offensive weapon. In Times columnist Bill Keller's words, MD "is not about defense. It's about offense," and this needs to be thought through. Keller's China scenario is the most persuasive:
-
Taiwan decides to risk a climactic break with mainland China The
mainland responds with a military tantrum. America would like to
defend the island democracy against the Communist giant--but we are
backed down by hints that Beijing cares enough about this issue to
launch nuclear missiles.
-
If we have a sufficient insurance policy, a battery of anti-missile
weapons sufficient (in theory) to neutralize China's two dozen
nuclear missiles, we should feel much freer to go to war over Taiwan.
19
The kind of proliferation just described is "vertical," within a single nation's arsenal; Richard Butler's Fatal Choice shows how vertical proliferation and "horizontal" proliferation can trigger each other and how strategic prophecies can be relentlessly self-fulfilling. It also shows how hard it is to break the logic of MacGuffinism from outside of its own terms and how dispiriting the alternative can look and sound. Butler's story is in part a personal narrative of service to Australia and to international bodies, as a delegate to the Conference on Disarmament, as his country's ambassador to the United Nations, and as the executive chairman of the UN Special Commission for disarming Iraq between 1997 and 1998 (of whose last days his The Greatest Threat, also published in 2001, is a melancholy account). It is also a reasoned defense of what he calls "the nonproliferation regime," the tissue of international conventions established by the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968, which Butler helped shepherd through its last two endangered renewals in 1995 and 2000. That regime is perennially threatened not only by the actions (or inaction) of its signatories but by its own contradictions, for it binds both nuclear and non-nuclear states to halting nuclear proliferation and also--this is a condition of its existence--binds the nuclear states to good-faith progress toward the elimination of their own weapons. 22 That, of course, they have signally failed to make, so every multilateral renewal of the treaty seems to skate on a thinner layer of confidence--belied by big-power measures that Butler terms "counter-proliferative," by which he means the opposite of "anti-proliferative." Creating an MD is a defensive counter-proliferative measure par excellence. "Proceeding with NMD would represent a major contradiction to the commitment the United States has made to work toward the elimination of nuclear weapons," Butler writes. "Instead, it would signal a determination to continue to rely on nuclear weapons into the indefinite future." 23 He has particular contempt for the "rogue states" rationale served up by Rumsfeld and Bush--in which supposed horizontal proliferation drives the vertical kind; it not only insults his intelligence, but bottoms on all the assumptions that his book assails: that nuclear weapons, because they cannot be uninvented, cannot be restrained; that "human nature" (a concept that is "both the least precisely mapped and the most enduring of historicisms") will always cheat for narrow national advantage; that arms accords are a snare and a delusion; and that "the proliferation horse has bolted; indeed, it is halfway over the hill, and it is too late to take preventive action to stop it." 24
The only thing wrong with Butler's non-proliferation regime, considered as a solution to the problem of nuclear arms, is that (as Churchill said of democracy) it's the worst except for all the others, and Butler knows it. Premising that "the problem of nuclear weapons is nuclear weapons," he tries to extract these arms entirely from the bad matrix of strategic "solutions," but it must be admitted that non-proliferation requires at least as large an act of (abstract, good) faith, on the part of the non-nuclear powers, as its alternative entails the steady practice of bad faith by the nuclears. Butler's reasoning also calls for just the kind of muscular enforcement action the U.S. is now about to undertake in Iraq, and his thinking might lead him to favor a preëmptive strike even if the smoking gun of WMD is not found, scientifically identified, and officially docketed. (He accepts the old report that Iraq may have tested a crude A-bomb in 1989 and the somewhat better attested story that Saddam was just six months away from exploding a nuclear device in January of 1991.) But "walking the hard yards" of disarmament, with an army and a navy if necessary, is the working diplomat's only alternative to "hunkering down to unilateral defense--the fatal choice." 25
Maybe the chance for that choice has passed, at least for the moment. Maybe the fighting faith necessary to break the MacGuffin's spell will come not from governments but from the people of the still (however marginally) democratic nations--those underwhelmed by the abstractions of arms control but able to respond to the imaginative challenge of what the U.S. government has in store for the world, as Caldicott and Grossman present it. For there is at least one more chapter to the story, one yet ulterior motive for MD, and here the MacGuffin takes flight for the stars--"in theory," still, but with a (literally) exorbitant sublimity.
It is not news that the military has always hoped to rule space and to rule from space. But it was not until the 1989 publication of John Collins' Congressionally commissioned Military Space Forces: The Next Fifty Years, copiously cited by Caldicott, that the practical details--of controlling near space from orbiting stations and rocket-powered battlewagons, of the relative advantages of directed-energy and biological weapons, of extraterrestrial mining and spaceborne warfighting--had been so concretely discussed outside a work of fiction or as explicitly proposed as a subject of competition. (U.S. space hegemony, Collins wrote, "could culminate in bloodless total victory, if lagging powers could neither cope nor catch up technologically.") 26 And it was not until 1997 that the U.S. Space Command, headquartered at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado, had the face to issue its Vision for 2020 in lurid comic-book form, with scarifying pictures showing space-governed wars on land, sea, and air and promoting the "full spectrum dominance" which the Space Command offers the nation by adding its power to those of the other armed services. 27
Caldicott and Grossman cite much language from the Space Command's Long Range Plan of 1998, written in an all-too-common dialect of stragegySpeak, at once antiseptic and prurient, just holding back from the exertion of limitless violence that Collins' "total bloodless victory" pretends to forestall. The LRP talks mostly about looking and knowing, occasionally about holding power just short of the fighting it promises. It anticipates "a seamlessly integrated force of theatre land, sea, air, and space capabilities" to enable "the combination of worldwide situational awareness and precise application of force from space" (all the italics are mine). Its inert noun phrases try (and fail) to buffer the actions they portray: by 2002, "a robust and fully integrated suite of space and terrestrial capabilities will provide dominant battlespace awareness enabling on-demand targeting and engagement of all ballistic and cruise missiles... and the ability to identify, track and hold at risk designated high value terrestrial targets." And the obsession with "seamless integration" (words curiously recurrent in documents like these) gives away the extreme fragmentation--of the means of making this fantasy real, of the earthly agents caught up in it--which it really implies. 28
These are the wet dreams of empire, and the object of their desire finally stands out in all its specular power--power applied at a distance, of course, in the phallic reveries of magical thought. (Caldicott is a fine gender critic as well as a superb polemicist; fastening on the phrase "hold at risk" at Ithaca College, she quotes a military strategist, "If he [the gendered adversary] values his grandma, we'll target his grandma." "I am a grandmother," she cried: "How dare he talk like that?") But can such literally totalitarian dreams be realized? This is a question with which the MacGuffin wants to tease us, and it might better be avoided. But societies with the ingenuity and resources to put hundreds of thousands of bits of serious junk into near space, permanently or transiently, cannot be counted on not to be able to shoot some of those bits down or to shoot down from them. Perhaps they can be dissuaded from doing so by shame or fear or even inspiration--by the pediatrician-activist Caldicott, founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility and more recently of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute and a longtime speaker and writer on the medical and environmental threat of nuclear arms; by the investigative reporter Grossman, whose particular concern is the space program's nuclear threat to the planet; and by the redoubtable organizer Bruce Gagnon, whose influence in Caldicott's and Grossman's books is strong. Gagnon, who spoke at Cornell in September and whose Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space 29 is a resource for organization and teaching, does not hesitate to appropriate the chiliastic language of space colonization for his own purposes; far from renouncing the whole space program as the military MacGuffin that it arguably is, he captures its story in another one, calling for "a global debate on what kind of seed we're going to carry on our inevitable journey into the heavens, the good seed of international cooperation or the bad seed of greed, environmental exploitation, and war." 30
Two other predictions are possible. First, space weapons, once on station below or beyond the moon's orbit, are remarkably vulnerable to the threat they pose to each other and to earthbound "assets" (ships, cities, grandmas). Perhaps a regime that depends on satellite communication and surveillance and celestial threats and counterthreats may come to look, even in the planning stage and in the perspective of strategy alone, so conspicuously vulnerable that it will fall of its own weight before being built. That, of course, will bring no nearer real implementation of existing arms control agreements or the creation of new policies and practices, both of which should remain high on progressive agendas.
Second, more reliably (if less consolingly), space weapons, once fully embodied in plans like those of the U.S. Space Command, will lose the last defensive pretenses they have borne with them since Reagan-era apologetics; it will be hard fully to "project" (in both the imaginative and the military senses) aggressive force into space without revealing it for what it is: aggressive, offensive force. To recur to one of the founding narratives of Missile Defense, it is rather hard go on talking like a Jedi while you're building the Death Star out there in the blue, for all the world to see. Maybe MD and its "seed" can bring us to the point where we can, at last, see the Empire and realize that it is us. That will be a victory, if by itself a small one.
1 Evan Thomas, "A New Day of Infamy," Newsweek 15 September 2001: 30-31. up
2 Stan Crock, "Star Wars: The Case for Going Ahead," Business Week 15 October 2001: 66. up
3Lee Bockhorn, "A New Day for Missile Defense," Daily Standard 21 October 2001: 30-31. up
4Barry Schweid, "Powell Pushes for Missile Defense," AP 17 January 2001, up
5Western States Legal Foundation, "The Shape of Things to Come: The NPR, Missile Defense, and the Dangers of a New Arms Race," April 2002 <http://www.wslfweb.org/docs/shape.pdf > up
6Union of Concerned Scientists, "Chronology of Missile Defense Tests" (12 March 2003) < http://www.ucsusa.org/global_security/missile_defense/page.cfm?pageID=600 >. Test failures and technical deficiencies of planned systems are elegantly summarized in Craig Eisendrath et al., The Phantom Defense: America's Pursuit ofthe Star Wars Illusion (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001). up
7 FitzGerald, 210. Mind-numbingly humorless classification of these imaginary weapons is supplied by Bob Preston et al., Space Weapons, Earth Wars (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, prepared for the U.S.A.F., 2002). up
8 In a recent article, Philip Coyle surveys the MD systems currently edging toward deployment and shows that not one actually proposed by the Bush administration -- only the Clinton-era leftovers -- can be deployed by the end of a second Bush Term. See "Rhetoric or Reality? Missile Defense Under Bush" Arms Control Today May 2002 < http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2002_05/coylemay02.asp>. Coyle was director of operational testing and evaluation for the Pentagon from 1994 to 2001.
Theodore Postol's "The Target is Russia" Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 56:2 March/April 2000: 30-35) explains why radar deployments in Alaska and Norway in Clinton's last year, ostensibly meant to detect "rogue state" launches, are actually part of a system of defenses against missiles from Russia and China. up
The history of the ABM treaty is summarized by the Federation of American Scientists, "Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty Chronology" 20 February 2003 < http://www.fas.org/nuke/control/abmt/chron.htm >
9 Caldicott, 164. up
10Donald Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock (New York: Da Capo, 1999); François Truffault, Hitchcock Revised edition New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985: 135f up
11 FitzGerald, 23, 209. up
12 FitzGerald, 207. up
12a And it was scientists, of course, who promptly called Reagan's hand -- most notably in The Fallacy of Star Wars, Based on Studies Conducted by the Union of Concerned Scientists, ed. John Tirman (New York: Vintage, 1984), an early, widely influential critique of Reagan-era missile defense plans with major contributions by Cornell physicists Kurt Gottfried and Hans Bethe. up
13 FitzGerald, 199. up
14 FitzGerald, 244, 372. up
15 FitzGerald, 109. up
16 FitzGerald, 75-78. She draws the category "imperial isolationism" and its opposite counterpart, "collective internationalism" from Charles and Mary Beard's America in Midpassage (New York: Macmillan, 1939).up
[post hoc: Nothing in this broad-brush ideological analysis excludes a more exact characterization of those most centrally responsible for the present belligerence of U.S. foreign policy. Writing of American "neoconservatives" in Le Monde of 15 April 2003 -- including those loosely called "defense intellectuals" today, such men as Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, and Douglas Feith -- Alain Frachon and Daniel Vernet remark:
These men are not isolationists, on the contrary. They are usually very well-educated, having vast knowledge of foreign countries whose languages they have often mastered. They share nothing with Patrick Buchanan's reactionary populism, which espouses a US retreat to deal with its domestic problems.Interestingly -- from a later perspective (6/3/03) -- it seems to have been the Le Monde article which kicked off a spate of stories in the U.S. mainstream and alternative press ascribing a particular intellectual heritage to the current crop of neocons. They are said to share a debt to RAND researcher Albert Wohlstetter ("The Strategist") and political theorist Leo Strauss ("The Philsopher"), both at one time teachers at the University of Chicago. See James Atlas, "The Leo-Cons: A Classicist's Legacy: New Empire Builders." New York Times 4 May 2003: Week in Review; Jeet Heer, "The Mind of the Administration," Boston Globe 11 May 2003; Seymour Hersh, "Selective Intelligence," New Yorker 12 May 2003 < http://newyorker.com/fact/content/?030512fa_fact> ; William Pfaff, "The Long Reach of Leo Strauss," International Herald Tribune 15 May 2003; Elizabeth Drew, "The Neocons in Power," The New York Review of Books 12 June 2003 < http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16378> .
The neoconservatives are internationalists, partisans of a resolute US activism in the world. Their ways do not resemble those of the GRAND Old Republican party (Nixon, George Bush Sr.), trusting in the merits of a Realpolitik and caring little about the nature of the regimes with which the US was doing business to defend their interests. Someone like Kissinger, for example, is an anti-model for them. Yet they are not internationalists in the Wilsonian democratic tradition (in reference to president Woodrow Wilson, the unfortunate father of the League of Nations), that of Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton. The latter are deemed naive or angelic for counting on international institutions to spread democracy.
--- "The Strategist and the Philosopher," trans. Norman Madaraz. CounterPunch 2 June 2003. <http://www.counterpunch.org/frachon06022003.html >
Such genealogies are at least symbolically useful, if liable to oversimplification and abuse. It is worth noting that "Straussian" has been appropriated by elements of the far right in America as code for (roughly) "conspiratorially oriented American Zionist intellectual." See Lyndon LaRouche, "The Essential Fraud of Leo Strauss," Executive Intelligence Review 21 March 2003 < http://www.larouchepub.com/eirtoc/2003/eirtoc_3011.html>] up
17 FitzGerald, 39, 372. up
18 FitzGerald, 25. up
19 Bill Keller, "Missile Defense: The Untold Story," New York Times 29 December 2001. up
20 Linda Rothstein, "Unfortunate," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 56:4 (July/August 2000): 2. up
21David Sanger, "U.S. Will Drop Objections to China's Missile Buildup," New York Times 2 September 2001. up
22 Butler, 58. up
23 Butler, 109. up
24 Butler, 10, 5, 112. up
25 Butler, 84-88, 123, 120. up
26 Collins, quoted at Caldicott, 118. up
27 United States Space Command, Vision for 2020 (February 1997) is available at the FAS website: http://www.fas.org/spp/military/docops/usspac/visbook.pdf up
28 The U.S. Space Command's Long-Range Plan (1998) is quoted at Caldicott, 119-21. up
29 Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space: http://www.globenet.free-online.co.uk/ up
30Bruce Gagnon, "U.S. Space Command: A Military Arm of Corporate Globalization," Critical Perspectives on the War on Terror, Cornell University, 12 September 2002. And see his "Space Domination: Pyramid to the Heavens" (1999) up