Iraq and Afghanistan aside, the Bush administration has not lost sight of the goal of making the U.S. the premier nation in star wars weaponry, says James Ridgeway in his Mondo Washington column in the Village Voice.
"We need to prepare for new forms of terrorism, to be sure," Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said in a post-9/11 speech, "but also attacks on U.S. space assets, cyber attacks on our information networks, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and nuclear, chemical and biological weapons."
And the president stands foursquare behind his hard-charging secretary of defense. Fresh in office, Bush outlined his ambitious space war policy:
"We need a new framework that allows us to build missile defenses to counter the different threats of today's world," the president declared. No treaty that prevents us from addressing today's threats, that prohibits us from pursuing promising technology to defend ourselves, our friends and our allies is in our interests."
True to that policy, the U.S. military is planning for possible deployment of mini-nuke weapons to supplement the protective screen of the star wars umbrella.
Just last month, while immersed in the sticky pragmatics of the global war on terrorism, Rumsfeld took time to explore the nation's progress in the bigger picture where space is at the very heart of American military strategy:
"Today, under President Bush's leadership, we have revitalized the missile defense research, development and testing, and we're on track to begin deploying the first rudimentary missile defenses, we hope, in the latter portion of next year."
As Ridgeway points out, such an aggressive military policy tosses to the winds all the elaborate containment theories, agreements and treaties that have been the stuff of international diplomacy since the end of the second world war.
But despite the novelty and some acute outcries, star wars remains the administration's hallmark project designed to ensure national security.
Rumsfeld sees as key an "unhindered access to space" and protecting U.S. space capabilities from enemy attack.
"In my view it will not be long before space becomes a battleground," Lt. Gen. Edward Anderson, deputy commander of the U.S. Northern Command, said recently.
"They can see that one of the ways that they can certainly diminish our capabilities will be to attack the space systems. Now, how they do that and who that's going to be I can't tell you in this audience," Anderson added.
Editor's note:
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