The Guardian 27 February, 2008
Satellite shot — a Star Wars test
The planned Pentagon shoot-down of the wayward US military satellite is nothing more than an opportunity to test new Star Wars anti-satellite weapons technology (ASAT), the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space said last week.
"The Bush administration is magnifying the risk to justify the testing of new dangerous and provocative offensive space warfare technologies", says Bruce Gagnon, Coordinator of the Global Network, which is based in Maine.
"At the time when we need to be constraining space debris-creating ASAT testing, this test will throw open the door to a new arms race in space."
The Strategic Command’s (StratCom) high-tech Global Operations Centre, buried beneath Offutt AFB in Omaha, Nebraska, played the lead role in coordinating the ASAT test. StratCom now heads all military space operations since merging with the US Space Command in 2002.
"The decision to destroy the American satellite does not look harmless as they try to claim, especially at a time when the US has been evading negotiations on the limitation of an arms race in outer space", a Russian Defence Ministry statement concluded.
For many years Russia and China have gone to the United Nations General Assembly with a resolution calling for a treaty to ban all weapons in space. The US and Israel have annually voted against the treaty while every other nation in the world supports such a new legal ban on space weapons. The US aerospace industry says that Star Wars will be the largest industrial project in the history of the planet Earth.
Global Network board member Stacey Fritz, Coordinator of No Nukes North in Alaska where so-called missile defence interceptors have been deployed says, "A culmination of events this month reveals the true direction of space weapons technology. China and Russia have formally proposed a new ban on space weapons on the heels of polls showing widespread public support for such a treaty in both the US and Russia."
Not only does the US refuse to consider the ban, but also after denying for years that these systems have offensive capabilities, the rogue Bush administration has demonstrated missile defence’s anti-satellite technology. The doors of the Trojan horse are spilling open and the new arms race is on.
Three US Navy Aegis destroyers, outfitted with missile interceptors, fired at the satellite as it fell back to Earth from positions just off Hawaii. These same Aegis ships are now being home ported by the Navy throughout the Asian-Pacific region giving the U.S. the ability to encircle China’s coast. These Aegis ships could give the US the ability to intercept China’s twenty nuclear missiles that today are capable of reaching the west coast of the continental US.
The Pentagon has been war-gaming a US first-strike attack on China, set in 2016, for the past several years, warns the Global Network. In that attack the Aegis ships would negate China’s nuclear retaliatory force by intercepting their missiles in the boost phase.
The Global Network is made up of more than 140-affiliated peace groups around the world working to halt the nuclearisation and weaponisation of space