Commentary—

Space Weapons Actually Weaken

US Security

By Leonor Tomero

In a little-noticed decision, the United States is reversing its longstanding leadership role in working to keep offensive weapons out of space. The biggest loser from this policy shift is likely to be the United States itself.

The National Space Policy announced last October asserts that “freedom of action in space is as important to the United States as air power and sea power,” leaving the door open for deploying space weapons or antisatellite weapons.

This unwise change in policy endangers American dominance of space by abandoning our traditional role of protecting peaceful use for all countries, thereby alienating our allies and provoking our adversaries to join a full-fledged arms race space.

The United States is presently the dominant space power. We benefit from and depend more on satellites than any other nation. We use them for spying, secure communications, and navigation and targeting data. The United States also relies on space for transmitting real-time financial transactions, remaining connected to our families, obtaining driving directions, and receiving weather forecasts.

Uncontested access to space is one of the keys to the American way of life. A disruption or end to that access would dramatically affect the lives of most of us. Because we have more at risk, we stand to lose the most by making space a battlefield.

While defending US satellites should be among our foremost priorities, building space weapons is not a reliable means to achieve this objective. For example, if the United States fires weapons that destroy enemy satellites, it would create space debris that could damage our own

It would not take much effort for other countries to neutralize America’s tremendous space advantage. Our adversaries would not have to match expensive and advanced technology that the United States might deploy. Instead of high-tech lasers that blind or disable satellites, other countries could employ low-tech and cheaper alternatives, such as simple multistage missiles or “killer satellites” that could explode near target satellites and prove disastrous to our assets. There are plenty of targets: We have thousands of satellites integrated into our way of life.

The new policy is additionally dangerous because it blurs the line between offensive and defensive weapons. Defensive space weapons necessarily enhance offensive capability, providing justification for other countries, like China, to develop their own. Just as countries engaged in a nuclear arms race a few decades ago, they might now engage in a space arms race.

Further, antagonism toward the United States because of the Iraq War and other unilateral actions will only be exacerbated by the new American policy. In 2005, the United States became the first and only country to vote against international talks to ban weapons in space: 160 countries voted yes, the United States voted no and Israel abstained.

The National Space Policy stipulates that our country “will oppose the development of new legal regimes or other restrictions that seek to prohibit or to limit US access to or use of space.”

The United States should provide leadership to ensure that space remains a haven for peaceful use. This country has championed peaceful space exploration for decades, collaborating with other countries, and we led the world 40 years ago in establishing the 1967 Outer-Space Treaty ensuring that no weapon of mass destruction could ever be used out there.

The United States has even more to protect now. Rather than pursuing an ineffective and unnecessarily aggressive policy that is likely to lead adversaries to pursue their own offensive weapons in space, we should establish international rules that will protect our assets and lock in our advantages by banning weapons in space.

To do so, we must work with allies and potential adversaries alike to make sure space remains a safe sanctuary. Most of the rest of the world desires these international rules; the United States now stands virtually alone. 

(Leonor Tomero is a nonproliferation policy analyst at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington, D.C. She is also a senior fellow at the Institute for International Law and Politics at Georgetown University.)