Don't Panic About Space Weapons

Team Infidel

Forum Spin Doctor
Wall Street Journal
February 22, 2008
Pg. 15
By Ashley J. Tellis
On Wednesday night (EST), the U.S. launched a missile and intercepted a dead satellite that would have otherwise uncontrollably re-entered the atmosphere, possibly threatening populated areas with a toxic load of hydrazine fuel. The mission has resurrected fears about the so-called weaponization of space.
The Chinese foreign ministry had earlier admonished Washington "to fulfill its international obligations in earnest and ensure that the security of outer space ... will not be undermined." Barely two days before Washington announced its intention to intercept the satellite, Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and China's U.N. representative in Geneva, Li Baodong, introduced a joint draft treaty aimed at banning weapons in space at the Conference on Disarmament.
Mr. Lavrov argued that the treaty was necessary because "weapons deployment in space by one state will inevitably result in . . . a new spiral in the arms race both in space and on the earth."
The introduction of weapons in space would be deleterious to global security. But the treaty unfurled by Messrs. Lavrov and Li would neither effectively prohibit their deployment, nor conclusively annul the threat of force against space objects. It would only produce the illusion of security, while doing nothing to eliminate the counterspace capabilities currently present in many countries, especially China.
The Bush administration is right to reject this treaty, and any successor administration should do so as well. The hard, if unpalatable, truth is that a peaceful space regime cannot be achieved by any feasible arms-control arrangement. The long track record of diplomatic failures, going back to the 1978-79 U.S.-Soviet ASAT negotiations, amply corroborates this judgment.
The biggest deficiency in the Russian-Chinese draft treaty is that it focuses on the wrong threat: weapons in space. There aren't any today, nor are there likely to be any in the immediate future. The threat to space assets is rather from weapons on earth -- the land- and sea-based kinetic, directed-energy and electromagnetic attack systems. The treaty entirely ignores these.
So is the solution to expand the treaty to "cover ground- or sea-based weapons," as the New York Times suggests? Easier said than done. Attacks on space-based systems can be undertaken by a variety of weapons having multiple uses, including satellite launch vehicles, ballistic missiles, surface-to-air missiles, nuclear warheads, high- and low-power lasers, and electronic warfare systems. None of these weapons need have any distinguishing external characteristics if they were to be used for counterspace missions.
In other words, counterspace weapons are impossible to identify by national technical means, or even by intrusive inspections. A treaty-based solution to mitigating space threats will be useless because compliance cannot be verified.
How about the abolition of entire classes of weaponry because of their counterspace potential? While such an outcome would certainly be conducive to both space security and general disarmament, it is unlikely to be contemplated -- even by those states most committed to outlawing weapons in space.
Anticipating this possibility, many arms-control advocates promote another fallback option -- namely, an agreement banning only the use of counterspace weaponry. This solution would not be worth the paper it was written on. Any compact that prohibits the use of weapons against space assets, but does not eliminate their development, production or deployment, would only become a legitimate invitation to breakout.
Even worse, the very first treaty violation itself could prove debilitating and costly for the state that suffered from it. This is why no country, especially the U.S., which relies so heavily on space, ought to be beguiled by such false promises.
Given the problems associated with arms-control solutions to space security, the Bush administration's rejection of the Russian-Chinese initiative is eminently sensible. More curious is why the Russians and Chinese would introduce such a draft treaty. Three hypotheses come immediately to mind.
First, they genuinely fear an imminent American deployment of space weapons -- perhaps in connection with missile defense -- and want a treaty to impede that deployment. If this is the case, Moscow and Beijing should relax. Not only does current U.S. space policy not authorize such a deployment, but the physics and economics of space weaponry are sufficiently unattractive presently to justify any headlong U.S. rush in that direction.
Second, a space security treaty allows Russia and China to engage in some eye-catching histrionics. It enables them to dominate international public diplomacy and paint the U.S. as the irresponsible driver of a new arms race.
Such a strategy has its attractions. The former Soviet Union engaged in such tactics extensively during the Cold War, and Russia has occasionally lapsed into similar temptations while opposing U.S. plans for missile defense in Europe. China seeks to deflect international attention away from the consequences of its own 2007 ASAT test, and its continued opposition to other disarmament initiatives. If that is what's going on, it is all the more imperative for the U.S. not to indulge them.
Third, the Russian-Chinese draft treaty remains a splendid way for Beijing to draw international attention away from its own growing counterspace program -- even as it enables Russia to assuage its own discomfort with China's space-denial capabilities.
This calculus is perfectly understandable. But both states might have helped the cause of space security more effectively if they were to focus on transparency and confidence-building measures, rather than the chimera of weapons in space. By proposing to ban what is, at best, a distant danger, the current draft treaty only ends up promoting a solution that is irrelevant to the real problem.
Mr. Tellis is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
 
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