CONQUERING THE HEAVENS

The U.S. Military Realizes Its Cosmic Aspirations

          The first time around it came with great bombast: President Reagan, in a nationally televised address, called for American ingenuity to be focused on ending the threat nuclear weapons posed to mankind. The March 23, 1983, speech startled the President’s close advisors as well as the nation. Reagan spoke of “changing the course of history” by “rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.” The vehicle was a missile shield over the United States, roughly akin to an impenetrable Astrodome. Once the U.S. developed this peacemaking technology with our allies, Reagan later elaborated, we would share it with the Soviets. The shield creation would usher in a new age of peace and prosperity.

          The second round of missile shield protection arrived much more quietly: the Missile Defense Act of 1999, mandating the deployment of a missile defense shield over the United States as soon as technologically possible, passed by a landslide in the House and Senate this spring. Capping the moral debasement of his presidency, Clinton is expected to sign the bill into law without protest.

          While Star Wars is remembered predominantly as a boon-doggle of Promethean proportions, the most threatening thing about it is that it upped the Reagan-era arms race a notch further: into the unsteady and unpredictable arena of space. Space had already been militarized for decades–with satellites that functioned like gunsights for missiles, and performed other martial surveillance duties–but with Star Wars actual space weapons were being added to the mix. Space-based lasers–in some versions fueled by nuclear explosions–would shoot down launching rockets, and Anti-Satellite (ASAT) weapons would chase Anti-Anti-Satellite (AASAT) weapons. A “use ‘em or lose ‘em” weight was added to the calculations of military strategicians who didn’t want their space-based eyes to be knocked out by the enemy.

          Today, as the technologically ludicrous idea of a missile shield comes back into vogue among the national security set the programs for space warfare are making their revival.

Star Wars

          The most alarming element of the original “Star Wars” program–known officially as The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)–was that it was the most prominent element of a concerted effort to prepare for fighting a nuclear war. Many in the Reagan military establishment viewed the possibility of nuclear warfighting with casualness. They used the language of cold strategical to mask their flirtation with mass death.

          One 1980 Foreign Affairs article written by two neophyte Nuclear Use Theorists–Colin Gray and Keith Payne of the Hudson Institute–was particularly dire. Entitled “Victory Is Possible,” the piece argued that it is both childish and hysterical to see “Armageddon, the apocalyptic war prophesied to end,” as the inevitable result of nuclear war. Instead, rational and effective strategicians need to acknowledge that “nuclear war can have a wide range of possible outcomes.” They argued that nuclear war is not only survivable and winnable, but that the U.S. must consider initiating it to win it. The price of victory, they estimated, with proper “homeland defense” mechanisms in place, would be 20 million Americans dead. This number was compatible with Gray and Payne’s stated goal of “recovering sufficiently to insure a satisfactory postwar world order.”

          The Reagan administration was forced to tone down their belligerent rhetoric vis à vis the Soviets by a massive “Nuclear Freeze” movement on both sides of the Atlantic. But the freaky Star Wars programs did not go away: they recessed into the shadows. Both Gray and Payne, for example, remain active in the same intellectual niche today, theorizing about nuclear deterrence in the post-Cold War era, and, in Payne’s case, consulting for the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, as SDI was renamed for the Clinton era. Explains Aldric Saucier, a high-level physical scientist for the U.S. Army Strategic Defense Command from 1982 to the early ‘90s, who went public with tales of contracting corruption: “Once a system like that starts it never stops. They just divert the money and call it something else.”.

Guarding the Silicon Sky

          The reassertion of U.S. military presence in space has been triggered by the presence of something to protect: the satellites of the civilian communications industry. Satellite communications–primarily to expand consumer markets and industry communications through direct-to-home satellite t.v. and cellular telephone/Internet networks–is one of the fastest growing sectors of the economy. The last few years have witnessed a sort of stellar gold rush. Between 1995 and ‘97 a half billion dollars of private investment were sunk into commercial satellite projects each month. In 1997 commercial launches outpaced military launches for the first time. The current industry hypster figure is that space-based business will account for 10-15 percent of the U.S.’s GDP by 2010.

          The military is now explaining its presence in space by the necessity of protecting the satellite industry. The Association of the United States Army, an industry flack group, hosted a symposium titled “Space in Support of Full-Spectrum Dominance” at their annual symposium in El Paso, TX, in December of ‘98. In the symposium Admiral Harold W. Gehman, Jr., the Commander-In-Chief of the U.S. Atlantic Command–the nation’s senior officer for integrating the technology of the future with today’s armed forces–stated that protecting commercial satellites was his immediate chief concern. Gen. Richard B. Myers, Commander-In-Chief of the U.S. Space Command, explained that he’d like to see more military activity along the lines of communications industry protection: “Predict, prevent, and protect in space, we haven’t done well in those areas,” said Myers in clipped tones. (He added without assurance: “Except in a few systems.”)

          Anti-Star Wars activists in the ‘80s denounced SDI as a massive subsidization of the civilian space industry, amounting to tens of billions of dollars, with administration efforts for much greater handouts. Time has shown that the critics were righteous. Indeed, some of the same military figures who launched Reagan’s Cold War II are now directly profiting on the space industry. Alexander Haig, whose tightly-wound appearance and outlandish comments as Reagan’s Secretary of State generously fueled the Nuclear Freeze movement,[1] is a primary pattern in Sky Station, a constellation of at least satellites orbiting 21 kilometers above the earth to provide wireless communications services. The estimated deployment date of the system in 2002. Defense contractors are also making out like bandits, with Lockheed-Martin, Loral, and TRW in particular being deeply involved in LEO projects.

          These projects represent the initial infrastructure of a communications industry that continues to expand upward rapidly. Writes Australian journalist Stewart Taggart in an article on the various satellite communications projects in Wired last fall: “Taken together, these satellite families will transform the night sky, effectively turning the orbits into foundations as solid as city streets for the building of new industries based in space.” The environmental costs of this deployment are tremendous, and have been getting absolutely no attention. Every rocket that burns through the atmosphere destroys a high percentage of a percentage of the ionosphere and the ozone layer, each of which shelter the Earth’s surface from lethal solar and cosmic rays. U.S. military research, dating back to the early ‘70s at least, to space station projects such as Skylab, documented the damage rocket exhaust did to the delicate balance of gases that constitutes these atmospheric layers.

          The militarization of space paved the way for the commercialization of space: in 1982, in his forward to Gary Stine’s Confrontation in Space, Herman Kahn, the preeminent intellectual of the first nuclear age, wrote: “in many ways space is almost the same kind of terra incognita that Africa used to be on old maps.” By 1999, writing in Silicon Sky, an enthusiastic book about the satellite industry, Gary Dorsey muses: “the near heavens have now been so well defined, so thoroughly charted and domesticated, that they may no longer be accurately called a frontier at all.”

Military Doctrine In Space

          Like the inherent expansionist drive of industry, the military presence in space is always pushing for the higher ground. The basics of military doctrine in space are explained by G. Harry Stine, a member of Reagan’s task force on space policy in the early ‘80s, in his 1982 textbook Confrontation In Space: Wars of the Future Will Be Fought In Space. As with terrestrial battle, achieving the higher ground is of the utmost importance.[2] The first points to contest dominance of in space itself, Stine explains, are the “libration points” where the competing gravity of the Earth and the Moon cancel each other out, making it possible for an object–such as a battle station–to rest there almost indefinitely.

          Two especially stable points are libration points L-4 and L-5, known as the “Trojan” libration points. Explains Stine: “The important military reality of either L-4 or L-5 is that the military commander there sits atop the hill of the entire Earth-Moon system. He has no gravity well to worry about.... He can maneuver at will.... He controls the Earth-Moon system”–and here’s the competition-fueling exception–“unless if somebody else occupies other Trojan libration points.” Reiterate defense consultants Alvin and Heidi Toffler a decade later in their War and Anti-War: “L4 and L5... may well be the equivalent of ‘high ground’ for the space warriors of tomorrow.”

          Complimenting its stance towards civilian satellites, the military is acting increasingly protective towards its own satellites–roughly 100 of the estimated 600 satellites now orbiting the globe. March 1st, 1999, the military pulled tracking information on its communications and surveillance satellites from NASA’s website, saying the information was “sensitive,” though not yet classified. “These satellites are absolutely critical,” Air Force Major Perry Nouis of the U.S. Space Command told the Washington Post in April, not just for the Balkans war but for all U.S. military operations. “There are a lot of adversaries out there who know we’re heavily reliant on these systems.” According to Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, The removal of the satellite information is part of a broader Pentagon move away from limited openness after the end of the Cold War,

HAARP: Global Dissonance

          One particularly freaky Star Wars hold-over is the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program: HAARP. Like other secret military programs that involve manipulating the atmosphere and beyond, it’s been fermenting into something powerful ripe throughout the distraction of the Clinton years.

          Based in southeastern rural Alaska, HAARP is a collaboration of the U.S. Air Force, Navy, and the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. The technology is owned by defense contractor Raytheon, who acquired it when they gulped down E-Systems in 1994, which was one of the largest intelligence contractors in the world.

          HAARP is often presented as a predominantly academic project, the goal of which is to utilize the ionosphere–the highest layer of the atmosphere–for military and civilian communications. When mentioned by the mainstream media, HAARP is held up as a particularly outlandish example of pork barrel politics, with Senator Ted Stevens, who folded $14 million for the project into the ‘99 Senate Defense Appropriations bill, being the culprit.

          But the reality of the creation is much creepier: scientists and activists watching it with trepidation are saying it has the potential to be “the most dramatic geophysical manipulation since the atmospheric explosions of nuclear bombs.” The one machine touches on many of the darkest fringe projects of military agencies of the last fifty years.

          The ionosphere performs a complimentary function to that of the ozone layer, filtering out Earth-frying radiation (the main difference between the two is the wavelengths of the radiation they filter). HAARP technology proposes to heat and lift the ionosphere, by focusing an intense electromagnetic burst at it. HAARP technology aims to harness the aurora borealis–the Northern Lights–into the electromagnetic transmitter. The electromagnetic waves would then bounce back towards earth, serving a range of functions.

          It’s a wacky idea, but, with enough money poured into it, a potentially viable one. The main question with HAARP isn’t “Can It Be Done?” but “What the Fuck’s Gonna Happen When It Is?” David Yarrow, a researcher in Albany, New York, explained some of the danger to Jeane Manning and Nick Begich, authors of Angels Don’t Play This HAARP[3]: “HAARP will not burn holes in the ionosphere. This is a dangerous understatement of what HAARP’s giant gigawat beam will do. Earth is spinning relative to thin electric shells of the multilayer membrane of ionospheres that absorb and shield Earth’s surface from intense solar radiation, including charged particle storms in solar winds erupting from the sun. Earth’s axial spin means that HAARP–in a burst lasting more than a few minutes–will slice through the ionosphere like a microwave knife. This produces not a hole but a long tear–an incision.”

          Dr. Elizabeth Rauscher takes Yarrow’s thought a step further: “The ionosphere is prone to catalytic reactions: if a small part is changed, a major change in the ionosphere can happen.” Rasucher likens the ionosphere to a soap bubble surrounding the earth’s atmosphere. If a big enough hole is zapped through it, she predicts, it could pop.

          But the military potential for such technology is limitless, and the Department of Defense appears to be pursuing it eagerly. On the less destructive end of the spectrum, possible uses for HAARP technology include identifying buried weapons labs with earth-penetrating radar, scanning for oil, gas, and mineral deposits, and replacing the current global communications network for U.S. submarines. “Star Wars” uses include building the transmitter to be able to pulse the ionosphere so that incoming ballistic missiles would experience an unexpected drag and run off target. The ionosphere is used to transmit radio signals all across the earth: another military use would be to jam radio communications world-wide using a precision that would protect our own systems.

          The technology could also be used to burn holes in the atmosphere so that selected targets could be incinerated from deadly radiation of outer space. Researcher Michael Unum thinks just such an even took pace, theorizing with what limited DoD information that’s available that a HAARP test in the summer of 1997 successfully burned a hole that allowed lethal gamma rays to rain down on the Nevada Test Site, the U.S. nuke-testing site north of Las Vegas.

          Further using include: the manipulation of the weather by targeting upper atmospheric wind patterns, causing floods, draughts, and other natural disasters. There’s also evidence that HAARP is interesting in applying one of the promising technologies of the developing police arsenal of “non-lethal” weapons–low-frequency electronic pulses that make humans sick–on an unprecedented scale. A transmitter bouncing back from the ionosphere would place the whole world in range.

          The accumulated military presence in space invokes the frustrated curse of Delos D. Harriman, the protagonist of Robert Heinlein’s 1949 novel  The Man Who Sold the Moon “Damnation! Nationalism should stop at the stratosphere.” If only.