Giving Saddam Space

The Wall Street Journal, 17 November 1997

Now that Saddam Hussein has once again turned his pathetically impoverished country into a kitchen for poisons and a stage for his grandiosity, it is time to look backward and up. Backward in time to 1991 when Israel was targeted by Iraqi Scud missiles. Up into space where most likely many future battles will be won or lost. Perhaps the heating up of the Persian Gulf will return attention to the current battles the Clinton Presidency is waging against the very systems required to control space.

Just a month ago, President Clinton wielded his new line-item veto to kill three space programs on the grounds that they could be put to military uses. Imagine that. Enthralled with the old-time fears of the “militarization of space” and clinging to the barren theology of arms control, the Administration is insisting that the best way to preserve national security is through unverifiable, unenforceable treaties. The one dearest to the hearts of arms controllers is of course the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, under which the U.S. and the now nonexistent Soviet Union pledged not to build defenses against possible missile attack. The Administration is bent on extending the ABM Treaty to include a ban on space-based missile defenses.

Surely Iraq’s madman exists partly to remind us of the foolishness of these ideas and the importance of the three vetoed space programs:

Clementine II. An extension of a successful satellite program that used technology developed under President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative to map the entire surface of the moon. Clementine II was supposed to conduct scientific research on how to intercept asteroids, employing equipment designed under SDI’s Brilliant Pebbles program for intercepting missiles in space.

Since asteroids have had an unhappy effect on this planet’s largest creatures, one would think that this would be a potentially useful area of study. Not if it violates the ABM Treaty, ruled the Administration, arguing that proposed asteroid-intercept tests hadn’t been cleared for compliance.

The fact that Clementine’s research might be applied to shooting down not just wayward asteroids but also enemy missiles was the kiss of death. The Administration’s development plan for a possible missile-defense program “does not include space-based weapons,” Robert Bell, the National Security Council’s top arms controller, told reporters covering the vetoes.

Military Space Plane. An early version of a flexible Air Force plane with vertical take-off and landing capabilities. NASA is also developing a space plane, as the Administration pointed out in its veto, but it is highly unlikely that this shuttle-like vehicle could serve a military use. Without a military space plane, there is no way the Air Force can become the Air and Space Force.

Kinetic Kill Anti-Satellite Weapon. An Army program that the Administration killed in 1993 and the GOP Congress has resurrected every year since then. “We simply don’t believe that this ASAT capability is needed,” Mr. Bell said in explaining the President’s veto.

This logic doesn’t comport with another event that took place in the same week as the veto–the test of the Army’s Miracl laser against an aging Air Force satellite. The Administration apparently doesn’t take it as a given that we need the ability to disable enemy satellites that might be spying on troop movements, etc. in time of war.

Mr. Clinton’s ASAT veto might well have been a response to Boris Yeltsin’s vehement objection to the Miracl laser test. Mr. Yeltsin has sent a Dear Bill letter formally requesting negotiations leading to a ban on anti-satellite weapons.

In vetoing the three space programs, the President laid down a marker. His vision of national security calls for unilateral restrictions on the U.S. ability to defend itself against future enemies using missiles as weapons. Most Republicans in Congress take a different view, believing that the best way to protect the national interest is for the U.S. to keep itself strong.

Obviously there are competing visions here of the nation’s security. It is a debate that deserves a wide public airing, which may come in the eventual Senate debate on the President’s amendments to the ABM Treaty. Over time, advanced missile-delivery technology most certainly will proliferate. Assuming that the Saddams of the world would somehow flinch from using such weapons against their imagined enemies strikes us as foolhardy. Refusing to develop appropriate defensive technologies is also foolhardy.