International Network of Engineers and Scientists Against Proliferation

Bulletin 18 - Moving Beyond Missile Defense

Star Wars and the Global War System

Alice Slater

Figure from Report of the Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Orgnization, January 11, 2001, p. 13.

The Rumsfeld Commission's issued its Report to Assess US National Security Space Management and Organization in January of 2001 at the request of outgoing Secretary of Defense William Cohen. Rumsfeld and his co-conspirators found that it is "possible to project power through and from space in response to events anywhere in the world... Having this capability would give the US a much stronger deterrent and, in a conflict, an extraordinary military advantage." They urged the US president to "have the option to deploy weapons in space... and to ensure that the United States remains the world's leading space-faring nation." Rumsfeld became the new Secretary of Defense soon thereafter and has enrolled Bush in implementing his proposals to turn the heavens into a new frontier for war. It was Rumsfeld who convened an earlier Commission under the Gingrich Congress to manufacture the threat of a missile attack from 'rogue' states - particularly North Korea, which started Clinton down the tragic path of the development of a National Missile Defense.

In reality, the NMD is a platform for a much more ambitious US plan to assert its global supremacy from the heavens. In an illustration of a laser beam from space zapping a target, the US Space Command's report, Vision for 2020, nakedly trumpets, "US Space Command dominating the space dimensions of military operations to protect US interests and investment. Integrating Space Forces into warfighting capabilities across the full spectrum of conflict." Vision For 2020 compares the U.S. effort to "control space" with the effort centuries ago when "nations built navies to protect and enhance their commercial interests" by ruling the oceans.

General Joseph Ashy, former commander-in-chief of the U.S. Space Command, has said: "It's politically sensitive, but it's going to happen. Some people don't want to hear this, and it sure isn't in vogue, but - absolutely - we're going to fight in space. We're going to fight from space and we're going to fight into space... We will engage terrestrial targets someday - ships, airplanes, land targets - from space... That's why the U.S. has development programs in directed energy and hit-to-kill mechanisms." Last year, the U.S. signed a multi-million dollar contract for a Space-Based Laser Readiness Demonstrator. A promotional poster shows the laser firing its ray from space, a U.S. flag waving in space above it. And the Rumsfeld Commission report of January 2001 backs up the naked quest for hegemony and to dominate the world in more sober language.

Corporate drivers for Star Wars

The Star Wars lobby has been led by companies like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, and TRW which are dividing up nearly $3 billion dollars in contracts, obtained in no small part from the $35 million they spent lobbying in 1997-98 and $6 million in campaign contributions in 1997-2000, deeply corrupting our political process. The Space Command's Long Range Plan: Executive Summary has a long list of "Acknowledgements to Commercial Industry" including 48 companies which are helping them to "dominate the military uses of space to protect US interests and investments." In order to reap their lucrative contracts they even rigged the data on all the NMD (National Missile Defense) flight tests, according to a TRW whistle blower, Nira Schwartz, a senior engineer who lost her job for challenging TRW's claims about the weapon's ability to distinguish warheads from decoys. Dr. Theodore Postol, a professor of science and national security studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a Navy science adviser in the Reagan administration, said that Pentagon officials are "systematically lying about the performance of a weapon system that is supposed to defend the people of the United States from nuclear attack."

This rapidly evaporating 'threat', in light of the news of a deliriously joyful and celebrated meeting between North and South Korea's leaders, and the willingness of North Korea to negotiate with the Clinton Administration, was first cooked up in 1998 by the first Rumsfeld Commission which sounded the false alarm. The Commission was formed by Congress and chaired by Donald Rumsfeld, the Ford Administration Secretary of Defense in his former incarnation, to give political cover to the diehard Star Warriors in Congress in league with the defense contractors. It's key finding was that 'rogue states' like North Korea could acquire ballistic missiles within "five years of a decision to do so" instead of the ten or fifteen years projected by US intelligence agencies. The flame of Reagan's cockeyed dream of a defensive shield against Soviet nuclear attack was kept alive and fanned by Frank Gaffney, a former Pentagon official in Reagan's administration who now heads the Center for Security Policy (CSP). CSP receives about 25% of its annual support from corporate sponsors, nearly all weapons manufacturers, a generous portion of which was contributed by the leading missile defense contractors Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and TRW.

Corporate globalization and the global war system

There is a deep connection to the global war system and the forces of corporate globalization. The WTO rules are based on the premise that the only legitimate role for government is to provide for its military. While the WTO attacks social policies, such as overturning the Massachusetts legislation which prohibited trade with Myanmar because of its brutal human rights record, and environmental policies, such as the ruling against US legislation to safeguard dolphins from huge tuna fishing operations, it consistently protects the war industry through a "security exception" in Article XXI in the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT). This security exception permits a country to take any action it considers necessary to protect its essential security interests. Actions "relating to the traffic in arms, ammunition and implements of war and such traffic in other goods and materials as is carried on directly for the purpose of supplying a military establishment" are exempt from its rules.

US military programs are driven by corporations and are feeding the global war machine. Lockheed Martin played a key role in the tragic deterioration of US-Russian relations. The Bush administration promised Gorbachev that if Russia did not oppose the admission of a reunified Germany into NATO when the Berlin wall crumbled ten years ago, we would not expand NATO. Yet the US Committee to Expand NATO, which lobbied furiously on the Hill to disregard our pledge to Russia, was chaired by the Vice-President of Lockheed-Martin, working successfully to expand its lethal market to Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. NATO's 50th Anniversary Summit in 1999 was hosted by corporate sponsors, including Boeing, Raytheon, and the like, who paid up to $250,000 to mingle and peddle their deadly wares to the 19 Foreign Ministers in attendance. (Oddly enough, the Washington Post contributed $25,000 to this gala of death.)

Secretary of Defense William Cohen in a meeting at Microsoft last year, lobbied Silicon Valley to support higher Pentagon budgets saying, "I will point out that the prosperity that companies like Microsoft now enjoy could not occur without having the strong military that we have". He urged them not to "dismiss the importance of the national security world" adding that "some soldiers in the high-tech revolution do not fully understand or appreciate the soldiers in camouflage... Real stability involves predictability - predictable and secure borders, threats that don't emerge unexpectedly and confidence that opposing interest will be resolved peacefully."

Thomas Friedman, a well-known and widely read columnist for America's most influential newspaper, the New York Times, champions globalization, arguing that "the hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist - McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnel Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps." These chilling remarks appeared in the March 28, 1999, Sunday Magazine section of the Times, its cover illustrated by a clenched fist clad in the red, white and blue stars and stripes of the US flag with the caption "For globalism to work, America can't be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is."

In October 2000, Admiral J.P. Reason, Commander in Chief of the US Atlantic fleet testified to Congress that: "A key part of the global economy's growth has been the proliferation of multinational corporation, many US-owned or partnered. They have improved the profitability and efficiency through the free exchange of goods and services around the entire world. And this was made possible by freedom of the seas, guaranteed by your United States Navy. In short, the navy has been and continues to be a sine qua non, a necessary precondition, of global economic prosperity and US national security."

There are other connections. President Clinton said in a speech delivered the day before his televised address to Americans about Kosovo, "If we're going to have a strong economic relationship that includes our ability to sell around the world, Europe has got to be a key... That's what this Kosovo thing is about." The bombing and missile strikes over Yugoslavia were giant bazaars for selling the wares of arms merchants. David Shea at Raytheon said, "We are expecting the Kosovo conflict to result in new orders downstream." Officials at Raytheon announced that replacing munitions used in the Balkans could lead to about $1 billion in new contracts. Nuclear weapons are the ultimate enforcers of US hegemony and corporate power.

The NPT outcome

In May of 2000 the NPT had its first five-year review since the extension conference of 1995. The New Agenda Coalition (NAC), formed in 1998, with eight nations - Ireland, South Africa, Mexico, Sweden, Brazil, New Zealand, and Egypt (Slovenia, eager to join NATO, dropped out under US pressure) - had begun lobbying other nations to press the nuclear powers for more progress on disarmament in UN meetings. The NAC had a major impact on the NPT Review and succeeded, after a late night session into the small hours of the morning, in negotiating a promise from the nuclear weapons states to "an unequivocal undertaking by the nuclear-weapon States to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals." Additional pledges were made for practical steps to demonstrate compliance with the NPT including:

further unilateral disarmament,

increased transparency by the Nuclear Weapons States of their arsenals,

further reduction of non-strategic nuclear weapons ,

concrete measures to reduce the firing time readiness of nuclear weapons systems,

a diminishing role for nuclear weapons in security policies,

the engagement as soon as appropriate of all the nuclear-weapons States in the process leading to the total elimination of nuclear weapons.

These new NPT commitments were made by Clinton on May 19, 2000 as the weapons labs continued to perform sub-critical tests at Nevada and to lobby for a new earth-penetrating bunker-busting nuclear weapon and for smaller more 'usable' mini-nukes, and as research and testing for Star Wars proceeds in full swing. At the close of the NPT, both Russia and China took exception to the final document without actually blocking consensus, warning that if the ABM treaty is violated, the promises made could not be fulfilled. China said none of the steps above would succeed unless a treaty to maintain space for peaceful uses was phased in simultaneously. With Bush pushing aggressively to open a new battlefield in space, and Cheney quoted as saying the ABM treaty is an "antique", we are now hearing reports of new weapons development in China, and a refusal by Putin to carry through on his START II agreements to dismantle nuclear weapons. This work has stopped in Russia since the date of Bush's inauguration. Last November at the UN, the New Agenda resolution, restating the outcome of the NPT, was supported by almost every country, including the US, China, and the UK, as well as Japan and the NATO countries with the exception of France. Eight countries abstained including France and Russia, while only three voted against this restatement of the NPT outcome: India, Pakistan, and Israel which are not members of the NPT.

What can NGOs do?

Abolition 2000, a global network working for a treaty to eliminate nuclear weapons, was organized in 1995 at the NPT Review and Extension Conference and called for the completions of negotiations on a treaty to abolish nuclear weapons by the year 2000. An Abolition 2000 Working Group drafted a model nuclear weapons convention which is now an official UN document, being discussed by nations and setting the context for the recent outcome at this 2000 NPT. In the five years of our existence we have grown to over 2000 members in 94 countries and because of the insistence of these NGOs on every continent, we have made the abolition of nuclear weapons an idea whose time has come. Back in 1995, the nations of the world were calling for the "ultimate" elimination of nuclear weapons; now the nuclear powers have given "an unequivocal undertaking to the total elimination of nuclear weapons." The context has shifted. The NPT 2000 Conference has given us an opportunity to press forward on a nuclear abolition initiative, if it is not derailed by Star Wars and a new arms race to the heavens.

The Abolition 2000 Working Group on the Military-Industrial Complex has been linking up with the anti-globalization movement. In Seattle during the WTO meetings, we held a workshop on the Global War System. In Washington DC at the IMF protests, we were able to link up with the International Forum on Globalization (IFG) and participated in their teach-in demonstrating how corporate globalization is enforced by military might. In New York at an IFG teach-in to nearly 2000 people on Globalization and Technology, we arranged for a panel on Star Wars and Nuclear weapons as an arm of corporate power.

In America, Congressman Dennis Kucinich plans to introduce an amendment to the House Appropriations bill this spring (2001), stripping out any funding for the Star Wars program. His staff is issuing a briefing which can be circulated by activists to their Congressional Representatives and Senators, laying out the reasons for why they should support a total cut-off of funding for this provocative program. GRACE has employed a professional writer to write a Citizens Brief documenting and explaining that Missile Defense is a misnomer for a hegemonic plan to dominate and control the planet from space.

A new Abolition 2000 Working Group on Missile Disarmament has been formed under the leadership of Jürgen Scheffran, INESAP, Zia Mian and M.V. Ramana, Princeton University and Andrew Lichterman, Western States Legal Foundation. Scheffran, in a preliminary paper for the Working Group notes that a "missile ban and a missile freeze" are "two sides of one coin." He proposes a ballistic Missile Convention which "would aim for the global non-proliferation and elimination of offensive ballistic missiles, in conjunction with conventions on the elimination of all weapons of mass destruction." While Scheffran notes that global missile disarmament "is a longer-term perspective, the need for action is now." He suggests that we call for a moratorium on the further development testing and deployment of ballistic missiles. "Such a 'missile freeze' would be like a break in the arms race, during which countries could consider and negotiate the next steps without time pressure."

Governments are beginning to look at options for controlling missiles. At the NPT Conference, Russia proposed a global missile confidence-building and nonproliferation regime which had been previously discussed in Moscow at a meeting of experts from 46 countries and the UN, including Iran, China, and India. A smaller meeting was held last March in Canada with experts from the UK, Germany Norway, Russia, and the US to explore more effective missile control, international monitoring and early warning.

NGOs must help to build the pressure on governments to take bolder steps for peace. In America we should support the Kucinich initiative and the work of the Abolition 2000 Working Group on Missile Disarmament to call for a missile freeze now. Committees can be established in each country to work with this new Abolition 2000 initiative, and help us, with colleagues from all over the world, to call forth this new action and make this vision an inevitable reality: the preservation of outer space for peaceful uses for all time. If we fail in this effort, I am afraid our work for nuclear abolition may never be realized.