AS WORLD WAR I broke out, Henry James identified an inexorable current that had been running below international events, leading to the "monstrous
scene" of August "as its grand Niagara." Below the glassy upriver surface, the swift tide had been driven by habits of mind, arms merchant greed,
imperial hubris, and a politics that was wholly inadequate. At the deadly cascade, nations tumbled into the most violent century in history. Writer
Jonathan Schell cites the Niagara metaphor to define the still running
momentum of war.
Boston Globe
Op-ed
Preventing an arms race in outer space
by James Carroll
May 12, 2008
AS WORLD WAR I broke out, Henry James identified an inexorable current that
had been running below international events, leading to the "monstrous
scene" of August "as its grand Niagara." Below the glassy upriver surface,
the swift tide had been driven by habits of mind, arms merchant greed,
imperial hubris, and a politics that was wholly inadequate. At the deadly
cascade, nations tumbled into the most violent century in history. Writer
Jonathan Schell cites the Niagara metaphor to define the still running
momentum of war.
But as James wrote, humans stood on another threshold. Wars had always been
fought on land and sea, but then new technologies of flight carried combat
into the realm above. Airborne weapons transformed killing. Indeed, air
force was the invention that made 20th century warfare catastrophic. In
looking back on that development, is it only naïve to ask if governments
could have agreed to ban weapons in the air? What if the dropping of bombs
from the newfangled aeroplane had been outlawed? The mind reels to think of
it.
A century later, the human race stands at an equivalent threshold, and a
version of that exact question is indeed being asked. Can weapons be banned
from outer space? Or will the Niagara current of defense contractor greed,
imperial hubris, and inadequate politics carry the destructiveness of war
into the "fourth battlefield" of the very cosmos? That is the question that
has been asked at the United Nations Conference on Disarmament in Geneva for
the last six years. But not by Washington. How many Americans know that the
nation refusing to discuss a treaty aimed at preventing an arms race in
outer space is their own? Indeed, the United States, in various Pentagon
documents published during the Bush administration, is explicit in aiming to
put weapons in space - lasers, directed energy weapons, kinetic kill
vehicles. The US Space Command, in its "Vision for 2020," plans for
"counterspace operations." The already deployed missile defense system is a
first step toward an anti-satellite capability, giving the Pentagon control
of the "high frontier."
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences recently published "Russian and
Chinese Responses to US Military Plans in Space," a stark look at where the
American project is taking the world. The academy was instrumental half a
century ago in creating the arms control regime that enabled the Cold War to
end nonviolently. Now it warns that "US space weaponization plans would have
potentially disastrous effects on international security and the peaceful
uses of space." Russia and China have insisted in Geneva that a treaty
banning such weapons is urgently needed. Failing that, neither nation sees a
choice but to respond - Russia by extending its aging ballistic missile
forces, and China by readying a space weapons program of its own. Last week,
for the first time since the Soviet era, missiles were paraded through Red
Square. Last year, China fired the warning shot of a first anti-satellite
missile test.
And how is the crucial question of weapons in outer space being considered
in America? As the quadrennial political conversation of the presidential
primaries was moving into gear last February, the Pentagon announced its
intention to send a missile into space to shoot down a "wayward satellite,"
supposedly to protect Earth from its unspent fuel. Many observers -
certainly including Chinese and Russians - questioned whether this was not,
in fact, a step toward anti-satellite weaponry? If Henry James were alive,
wouldn't he have recognized an upshift in the current toward Niagara? Yet
neither the presidential candidates, nor the pundits and moderators who yap
at them, saw in this event anything to discuss. The missile was fired, the
satellite destroyed. No big issue. The world-historic decision about
carrying warfare across the last threshold into outer space is being left to
defense contractors, military commanders, and their wholly owned subsidiary
on Capitol Hill. Not since August 1914 has politics seemed so irrelevant.
Humans who did not think to ban weapons from the air a century ago know
better when it comes to outer space. Yet what are we doing? And if the
deadly current is still hidden, what is that low rumble that can be heard,
rolling toward us from down the river?
James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
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