Editorial
Bush is launching space-based warfare

Before President Bush made him secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld chaired two commissions charged with advising the White House on future defense issues:

• One concluded that the possibility of a ballistic missile attack against the United States is a lot more real and imminent than U.S. intelligence had previously predicted.

• The other suggested that hostile countries or groups virtually certainly would attack the highly vulnerable U.S. satellite network.

These two reports help to explain Bush's hell-bent embrace of a national missile defense. But there are important philosophical reasons, too:

• Like Ronald Reagan, George Bush seems intuitively to believe that the missile defense is technologically within American grasp, despite test results to the contrary.

• Bush thinks massive U.S. spending on missile defense may lead unfriendly nations and groups to bankrupt themselves in trying to counter it, much as the Soviet Union long has been thought to have gone bust because it tried to match Reagan's profligate spending on his unsuccessful "Star Wars" missile defense.

• Some conservatives, and Bush's blunt talk lately may indicate that he's one of them, seem to believe that a reliable missile defense will mean Washington would substantially reduce the need to be civil to and compromise with distasteful regimes around the world.

Many objections have been raised to the idea of a national missile defense, including its obscene expense (we're still paying off the deficits run up when Reagan insisted both on missile defense spending and tax cuts); the technological difficulties; the protests of our closest allies; the near certainty that China and Russia will respond by building enough new warheads and missiles to overwhelm the defense; the need to breach the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972; and more.

But little notice has been given to the cavalier manner in which Bush appears to wish to militarize space.

The key to national missile defense, assuming capable interceptor missiles can be developed, is the satellite-based sensors that detect, track and warn of launches anywhere in the world. The problem is, the satellites are highly vulnerable. Any power that can build a nuclear warhead and a ballistic delivery system can also build anti-satellite weapons.

In an article in the latest Foreign Affairs magazine, Michael Krepon writes of the two options Bush has to protect his sensor satellites:

• One is to keep others from developing anti-satellite weapons by refraining from developing them ourselves. This, writes Krepon, worked well in the Cold War, when Americans and Soviets alike "realized that they had more to lose than to gain from such competition."

• The other option is to seize outer space, own it and dominate it by stationing weaponry in space to counter the anti-satellite threat. Tempting though it may be to gain an advantage in space, the risk of an extra-terrestrial arms race is even greater.

Militarizing outer space, as Hawai'i's late Sen. Spark Matsunaga warned decades ago, is a step that right-thinking individuals should shrink from. The U.S. and Soviets refrained from it by agreeing to remain exposed to each others' missiles. This accommodation was formalized in the ABM treaty. The mutually assured destruction regime was scary, but not as frightening as nuclear fireworks outside the Earth's atmosphere.

The first hints from Bush's emerging foreign policy suggest chauvinism and arrogance, lack of deep thinking and an ongoing shortage of expertise. We must hope we've seen fledgling missteps from Bush rather than the emerging outline of things to come.