Accessory to War

by Neil DeGrasse Tyson

  ASATs, like so many other elements of contemporary military thinking and technology, have taproots in the Cold War, when threat inflation held sway at the Pentagon.51 In tandem with their earliest work on satellites, both the USA and the USSR actively pursued antisatellite weapons. By 1962 the United States had produced interceptors fitted with nuclear warheads; by 1968 the Soviet Union had carried out the first successful test of a non-nuclear, kinetic-kill interceptor. During the next few decades, while continually voicing anxiety over each other’s ASAT tests, the two sides kept designing and sometimes building ASATs based on land, sea, and air as well as an antisatellite orbital station or two. Although many of these weapons were eventually abandoned or mothballed for political and self-protective reasons—a mutually soothing policy that some political scientists call “contingent restraint”—the planning and execution continued in a whirl of simultaneous escalation and de-escalation, confrontation and quasi-cooperation, anxieties and pullbacks.

  Finally, in August 1983, five months after Reagan’s Star Wars speech—as certain members of Congress were working up legislation aimed at achieving a joint US–Soviet moratorium—Yuri Andropov, general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, met with a bipartisan delegation of nine US senators in Moscow and committed the Soviet Union to a moratorium on the deployment of any new ASAT systems in space, even for testing purposes. The United States did not follow suit. In October 1985, an American ASAT—a small missile launched from an F-15 fighter jet—took out an aged American scientific satellite, spreading debris throughout low Earth orbit.

  By the way, the Soviet Union regarded America’s space shuttle as a possible ASAT. National security specialist Joan Johnson-Freese suggests they feared its robotic arm, which might “pluck satellites out of the sky.” UK military space specialist Matthew Mowthorpe proposes instead that the Soviets feared its possible cargo of nuclear missiles.52

  One of the more imaginative ASAT designs was the Kinetic Energy Antisatellite (KE-ASAT) interceptor, birthed in the United States. It would not only smash into and destroy its target satellite but also envelop the resulting space debris in a giant Teflon sheet. Notwithstanding the unlikelihood of this environmentally tidy outcome, KE-ASAT has not completely disappeared from America’s portfolio.53 Nor has the ASAT as a category disappeared from the global arsenal. The United States, under the banner of safeguarding its extensive space assets, continues to invest far more heavily than any other country in antisatellite research and development. Other countries, too, are pursuing the ASAT: Russia tested one in November 2015, Israel and India are working on theirs, and North Korea keeps demonstrating how fiercely it wants one and how close it is to getting what it wants. The most striking demonstrations of ASAT power in recent years, however, were carried out on their very own satellites by China (2007) and the United States (2008).

  Let’s say you want to harm a satellite or, at a minimum, be recognized as capable of doing so. Harm covers a lot of tactical territory, ranging from temporary disruption to obliteration. Moving lethal levels of energy across the distances inherent in space warfare is still a stretch. Even if you could do it, tomahawking an enemy satellite out of the sky would be as expensive and dangerous to your own and your allies’ space assets as it would be to those of your enemies. Deploying a missile from an airborne platform would be easier and less expensive but would make no less of a mess in space. Simple disruption seems the way to go.

  If you’ve got a strong enough laser, you could focus it at the satellite’s circuit box or transmission antenna, which would disable the satellite completely and cheaply with no muss or fuss. Or how about swamping the satellite’s sensors with a laser brighter than whatever the satellite might be trying to monitor or record—an act of high-tech vandalism called dazzling. If your laser is energetic enough, you could even melt, evaporate, or fracture parts of the satellite’s sensor, partially blinding it. You could also consider having your own spacecraft sidle up to the enemy satellite and spray-paint its optics or physically break its antenna. A cheaper, easier approach to disruption—at least until quantum satellites take over—would be to interfere with satellite communications either cybernetically or electronically. A powerful Earth-based transmitter tuned to the right frequencies can compete with the signal that an enemy receiver needs to receive. That transmitter could drown out the enemy’s real signal with meaningless noise, otherwise known as jamming, or mimic the real signal with a fake one of similar power, otherwise known as spoofing. In these cases, there’s no need to destroy anything as you turn the transmitter into a useless hunk of junk.54 Strictly speaking, your jammer or spoofer would not be classified as a space weapon, nor would the interventions of a hacker. Plus, most of the measures we’ve mentioned could be accomplished more readily and cheaply from land, sea, or air than from an orbiting platform. In the end, of course, carrying out any of these attacks risks retaliation in kind.

  What, then, is the status of the arsenal for a space war? “Modern warfare can be fought on so many delightfully different levels,” says the creepy Baron Ver Dorco in the sci-fi classic Babel-17.55 Yes, there’s a cornucopia of imaginary choices: directed mass, directed energy, chemical, biological, electronic, nuclear, cyber, terrestrial, submarine, aerial, orbital, parasitical, face-to-face, close-range, remote-controlled, robotic, boost-phase, midcourse, targeted, carpeted, smart, dumb. But the space weaponry piece of this picture has little to do with actual warfare. It’s mostly about threat and deterrence. It’s about potential, power, perceived and projected superiority. Nonetheless, warfighters and national security planners everywhere will not stop trying to actualize the imaginary.

  Given the many human-made threats to human life and property, the General Assembly of the United Nations has (among its many other frustrating endeavors) struggled since the dawn of the space age to establish rules of the road for achieving “freedom of scientific investigation [and] international cooperation in the exploration and use of outer space” and to keep outer space free of weapons in order to “avert a grave danger for international peace and security.”56 Within a few decades, the United Nations also began to tangle with the mounting problems of space debris and global space security.57

  Some might say such efforts are naive: that whoever owns space assets should take charge of protecting them, that the militarization of space in the interests of protecting one’s assets is inevitable, that one unbalanced person in power can undo any space agreements the community of nations has adopted. Others might reply that everybody’s space assets would be far more vulnerable if there were no international agreements or resolutions in place, if there were no collective effort to preserve what we each separately have. As James Clay Moltz, a specialist in matters of conflict, nuclear and otherwise, points out, “unilateral military approaches to space security can go only so far.”58 Fear of retaliation and the costs of escalation constrain most unilateralists.

  Diplomacy is one of the few paths forward. However arbitrary it may seem to name a starting date and place for the intricacies of space diplomacy, let’s go with October 4, 1954, at a planning meeting of the International Council of Scientific Unions in Rome. There they conceived and planned for the first ever (and only ever) International Geophysical Year. Oddly, it was to span a year and a half, from July 1957 through December 1958. IGY represented a Cold War thawing of frozen scientific interchange concerning oceanography, seismology, glaciology, meteorology, solar activity, and related topics. Sixty-seven countries collaborated on IGY, including the United States and the Soviet Union.

  At that meeting, the US representatives proposed that satellites equipped with observation instruments be launched during IGY. Historian Walter A. McDougall writes that, shortly after the end of World War II, observation/reconnaissance satellites topped US space thinkers’ wish lists but that such satellites “could not have been more delicate from the standpoints of international law, diplomacy, and strategy.” Only a scientific satellite could neatly embody the princi
ple of freedom of space—the Americans called it Open Skies—and so the IGY proposal, made in an international context, amounted to a fortuitous match between need and opportunity. Though the Soviet representatives contributed no comments regarding the US proposal, the committee as a whole unanimously welcomed it. Their approval “pulled back the hammer on the starter’s gun in the satellite race.”59

  Both US and Soviet scientists had already been developing artificial satellites and a suitable launch rocket or rocket package for almost a decade.60 In early October 1945, one month after the formal end of World War II, the US Navy had established the Committee for Evaluating the Feasibility of Space Rocketry. Also formed in 1945, and also charged with producing a feasibility study, was the Army–Navy joint Guided Missile Committee. Two top-secret operations, Overcast and Paperclip, had transported hundreds of tons of equipment, vast quantities of technical documentation, and scores of newly laundered Nazi rocket scientists and engineers to the United States, including Wernher von Braun and Arthur Rudolph. By 1946, new consultative frameworks such as Douglas Aircraft Company’s Project RAND and President Truman’s Air Policy Commission were hard at work (recall that RAND’s first report presented a preliminary design for a satellite). That year, a Yale astrophysicist named Lyman Spitzer produced a report for RAND called “Astronomical Advantages of an Extra-Terrestrial Observatory.” Free of atmospheric attenuation, such an instrument would be better able to detect visible light from the universe than could any ground-based telescope and also able to detect bands of light almost entirely blocked by the atmosphere, such as ultraviolet and infrared. The Hubble Space Telescope is Spitzer’s legacy.61

  Soon the newly independent US Air Force, which until 1947 had been the Army Air Force, began to compete internally with the Army and Navy for military primacy in space R & D.62 The Air Force and RAND focused on the feasibility of the satellites themselves, while the Army and Navy focused on the missiles—the rockets—that would boost the satellites into orbit. Different factions had different priorities. By early 1949, the satellite’s potential for prestige and reconnaissance clearly outweighed its potential as a weapons platform. The idea that a satellite could be an excellent meteorological tool also emerged. By the time Harry Truman left the Oval Office, in January 1953, the groundwork had been laid for a US space program that would be politically and militarily advantageous but not simply a pipeline for new generations of weaponry.63

  Cold War rocket research in the Soviet Union started off as a means to a different end: the delivery of a nuclear bomb to the continental United States. Stalin—for whom “the danger was not the atomic bomb as such, but the American monopoly of the bomb”—fast-tracked work on a Soviet bomb within days after Hiroshima, devoting seven times as much funding to it from 1947 through 1949 as was allocated in the same period to developing a rocket capable of carrying that bomb to any target on Earth’s surface.64 The first Soviet nuclear test, an atomic bomb with a plutonium core (similar to the A-bomb that the United States dropped on Nagasaki), took place in August 1949. The first Soviet test of an H-bomb took place four years later, with an explosive yield almost twenty times that of the A-bomb. Now the issue of delivery moved to the forefront.

  Despite Stalin’s early lack of interest in his country’s missile program, Soviet progress was swift and substantial. The Soviet “trophy brigades” that plundered Germany’s V-2 work sites in the spring and early summer of 1945 initially regarded the huge rocket as “nothing more than a glorified artillery projectile.” Yet by 1947, Soviet missile designers, under the supervision of the indefatigable Sergei Korolev and aided by captured German rocket scientists, had not only mastered the construction of the V-2 themselves but had convinced the nascent missile industry to develop an ICBM with a range of almost two thousand miles—ten times farther than that of the V-2. Within a few years, Korolev’s first deputy had proposed that the goal be at least twice that. By late 1953, the missile designers were being told to develop an ICBM capable of carrying a six-ton payload. Such a huge capacity was twice the mass Korolev and his team had been expecting. But that unexpected challenge had an upside for the USSR: any rocket powerful enough to carry a heavy bomb would also be able to lift a satellite into Earth orbit.65

  While some members of the military-industrial sector focused on the Soviet bomb and others focused on the Soviet missile, a few took up the mantle of their countryman Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who decades earlier had thought about multistage rockets as an efficient way to launch a satellite. Well-placed Tsiolkovsky followers, along with legions of civilian space enthusiasts and popularizers, dreamed of a Soviet entry into space. Foremost among them was an aeronautical engineer named Mikhail Tikhonravov, a comrade of Sergei Korolev’s who worked at the think tank NII-4, the Soviet counterpart to RAND, and who was a key part of the USSR’s space program from Sputnik to Gagarin. In 1951 Tikhonravov created a small satellite research team at NII-4; in the fall of 1953, half a year after Stalin’s death, NII-4 expanded the team into a full-scale secret project, Research into the Problems of Creating an Artificial Satellite of the Earth, codenamed Theme No. 72. The problems ranged from putting a satellite in orbit to using a satellite as a bombing platform.66

  So, by the end of 1953—less than a year after the termination of both Stalin’s and Truman’s time at the helm—the two Cold War adversaries had established their space agenda as well as their space personnel. The following year, the IGY resolution forced them to deliver. Competition crystallized. IGY’s satellite project soon metamorphosed from an idealistic, supranational collaboration of truth-seeking scientists (to whatever extent it had been so) into a fight for alpha status between American Imperialism and the Red Menace.

  Meanwhile, East Asia, though caught up in damaging, convoluted confrontations involving both superpowers, was also mobilizing for space. Rocket scientists in Japan used the upcoming IGY as the rationale for developing homegrown rockets for atmospheric research. Mao’s China was on the brink of welcoming back the man who would jump-start its space program: Qian Xuesen, a Chinese-born professor of aeronautics at Caltech and MIT, a founding member of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and a member of the elite Scientific Advisory Group set up during World War II to advise the US military on the possibilities for wartime air power. So valuable was Qian to America’s rocket research that in April 1945, despite his not being a US citizen, he was given the title “expert consultant” and the temporary rank of colonel in the US Air Force so that he could deploy to Germany and interrogate the V-2 scientists, including Wernher von Braun, who had just handed themselves over to the Americans. Yet in 1950, during the heyday of America’s Red Scare, Qian was accused (without evidence) of being a member of the Communist Party and was soon robbed of his security clearance and professional opportunities. In 1955, minus his papers and belongings, he was deported to China. As a former undersecretary of the Navy famously said, his deportation was “the stupidest thing this country ever did.”67 Within a few years, Qian Xuesen had become his country’s Sergei Korolev.

  Vilification of Communism by the West—and of imperialism by the East—was standard practice by the time Qian returned to his country of birth. The House Committee on Un-American Activities had poisoned US politics. Winston Churchill had introduced the term “iron curtain” to the “free world” in 1946, after having tried out “iron fence.” Truman had delivered his Truman Doctrine speech to Congress in March 1947, calling for the United States henceforth to support “free peoples” and oppose “totalitarian regimes” anywhere and everywhere, at a 1947 price tag of $400 million. Peacetime militarization, too, was on the rise. “Security” had become a prime focus of policy. The National Security Act of 1947 completely overhauled the structure of the US military, establishing the Department of Defense to replace the three separate military services and creating the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency. The secretary of war disappeared, his cabinet post taken over by the secretary of defense. The North Atlantic Trea
ty, which gave birth to NATO, was signed in April 1949; its purpose, according to the American consensus, was “to create not merely a balance of power, but a preponderance of power.”68

  Alarmed at the possibility of “capitalist encirclement,” the USSR responded forcefully to the flurry of “free world” rhetoric and military/economic institution-building in the West. In 1946 the Soviet Union refused to join the newly formed, US-dominated World Bank and International Monetary Fund, dashing American hopes that an influx of dollars would induce a Soviet retreat from Eastern Europe. In 1947, having failed to gain traction during planning sessions for the Marshall Plan, the Soviet foreign minister began work on the Molotov Plan for the Eastern Bloc. In late June 1948 the Soviet Union imposed what turned into a yearlong blockade of all surface routes from Allied-occupied western Germany to the Western-occupied sectors of Berlin—a blockade made possible because the entire city of Berlin is located far inside what was then the Soviet occupation zone. During Stalin’s last couple of years in power, as his hopes, fears, demands, and missteps in Germany, Korea, China, Japan, and much of Eastern Europe gave rise to increasingly unpalatable conditions, he began a second round of political purges—reviving the 1936–38 campaign that had thrown Sergei Korolev into a series of labor camps and penitentiaries for many years and sent hundreds of thousands of other Russians, notable and ordinary, military and literary, to their death.69

  One top-secret document that exemplifies the fraught politics and charged political language of the early Cold War and encapsulates America’s foreign policy during much of the second half of the twentieth century is NSC 68, “A Report to the National Security Council, by the Executive Secretary, on United States Objectives and Programs for National Security,” dated April 14, 1950.70