ORBITAL MISSILE INTERCEPTORS

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WASHINGTON READY TO DEPLOY ORBITAL MISSILE INTERCEPTORS
21:09

26/ 04/ 2005

MOSCOW, (RIA Novosti political commentator Andrei Kislyakov) Miracles only happen in fairy tales, not in the high-tech world, which lives according to its own logic.

In the middle of April, Lieutenant General Henry Obering, the director of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency, addressed the 3rd Annual Missile Defense Conference in Washington, where he said new global threats highlighted the need to create space-based defensive systems.

So, although there are no weapons in space today, they may well be there tomorrow. In particular, this means orbital interceptors, which, in Obering's opinion, should become part of America's ballistic missile defense program.

Moscow expected Obering to say something like this, but was never likely to term it good news. "The deployment of anti-ballistic missile systems' information-reconnaissance and strike elements in space will reduce the threshold of global military danger," Vladimir Belous, leading research associate at the World Economy and International Relations Institute, said. "And an arms race will begin in space."

Although President Bush recently said that orbital weapons would not be deployed, the opposite seems inevitable, which is the main danger of the NMD program. Indeed, its "eyes" and "ears" (the information-reconnaissance infrastructure) that will be deployed on space vehicles must be given the appropriate protection.

The U.S. leader assured Canada's premier in Ottawa last year that his administration did not intend to deploy orbital weapons. However, it is worth repeating: miracles do not happen in the defense-technology world. First, any new invention requires adequate protection. Second, a more effective counter technology will always emerge.

By introducing allegedly useful defense technologies, mankind could gradually lose control over its own achievements.

There is a solution to this predicament. Alexei Arbatov, a leading Russian authority on strategic arms, said on April 19 that America's military security depended on the normal operation of auxiliary space systems like no other country. "Naturally, the United States does not want countries such as Russia, China and some others to develop anti-satellite weapons," Arbatov said.

He said attempts cold be made to try to convince Washington that it would be better to ensure spacecraft safety on the basis of various accords and international-law restrictions than to deploy anti-satellite weapons for shielding these systems.

"Russia will have to modify its policy of the last few years and start producing more initiatives. This could rid us of a new threat that could be a serious problem for Russia: the deployment of attack weapons in space," Arbatov said.

Moscow has already put forward this initiative. The Russian delegation told the First Committee of the 59th UN General Assembly last October that it would not deploy any space weapons. This unilateral Russian initiative did not come with any pre-conditions attached, while Russia also called on all other space powers to follow its example.

If the Russian initiative is supported, then unilateral military superiority in space will remain non-science fiction.

http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20050426/39745039.html

Weaponization of space will have unpredictable consequences
19:11

05/ 04/ 2006

MOSCOW, (RIA Novosti political commentator Andrei Kislyakov)

The United States has promised to make public in the next few months its new space doctrine, which allows for the deployment of weapons in outer space.

Colonel Anthony Russo, chief of the U.S. Strategic Command's space and global strike division, said the time was ripe for clearly stipulating the Pentagon's responsibility for the security of the national space group. Space-based laser and kinetic energy weapons will be used against those who create obstructions to U.S. satellites. Logically, this will lead to the creation of a space theater of war.

Much has been written and said about the inadmissibility of space weaponization. In early March, Russia's Ambassador to the UN office in Geneva Valery Loshchinin said again that the placement of weapons in space would "provoke a new round of the race for nuclear missile and other arms, both in space and on the Earth, which would boost the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their delivery vehicles."

Russia has reaffirmed that it would not become the first to orbit weapons of any type and called on all countries to follow its example.

But appeals are quickly muffled when weapons are cocked.

"Russia has the ability for an adequate response to the countries that orbit their weapons," Russia's Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said during an official visit to China in late August 2005.

"Both Americans and Russians are actively using space for military purposes. However, they have been observing certain limits so far, deploying only communications, targeting, intelligence and other [defense-related] spacecraft.

These are not weapons. But the deployment of weapons in space will have unpredictable consequences."

You can imagine the consequences from another of the minister's quotes: "We are orbiting commercial spacecraft from 30 or 40 countries, if I remember correctly," he said. "As to carrier rockets, they are quite another matter."

Russia annually orbits a great deal of other countries' payloads and it does not always know what exactly those are. Therefore, the Russian space industry may become an indirect hostage to an orbital conflict, which means the renewal of the race for all imaginary weapons, with a logical "adequate response".

Back in 1983, Yury Andropov, then General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee, publicly announced the termination of all space weapons programs in the Soviet Union. The country made that gesture of goodwill in the hope that the U.S. would abandon its Star Wars program.

From the late 1950s to the early 1980s, the Soviet Union had attained considerable success in the creation of combat space systems. In 1959, the OKB-52 specialized machine-building design bureau started creating an anti-satellite (ASAT) defense system. At the same time, the NII-4 research institute of the defense ministry started analyzing possible ways of fighting potential adversaries' satellites.

These efforts came to a head on June 18, 1982 when the Soviet General Staff held an exercise simulating a nuclear and space war that lasted more than seven hours. First, two UR-100 (SS-11 SEGO) intercontinental ballistic missiles were launched, closely followed by an intermediate-range mobile missile Pioner (a predecessor of Topol) and a ballistic missile launched from a nuclear-powered submarine in the White Sea.

After that, two anti-missiles were launched at the warheads and the interceptor satellite Kosmos-1379 was launched into a low, near-Earth orbit from the Baikonur spaceport. Several hours later, it passed in close proximity to the Kosmos-1375 satellite, which simulated the American navigation satellite Transit.

Despite the official prohibition of all tests of space interceptors on August 18, 1983, the Salyut design bureau was secretly creating a combat space station armed with laser and missile weapons called Skif.

In spring 2006, the concerned agencies of Russia and the Untied States started doing something real. In early March, Colonel General Vladimir Popovkin, Commander of the Russian Space Forces, toured strategic military facilities in California and Florida at the invitation of General James E. Cartwright, Commander of the United States Strategic Command.

A month later, General Cartwright visited the headquarters of the Russian Space Forces, the computer center of the space control system, the Space Mission Center, the Plesetsk spaceport and the Mozhaisky Aerospace Academy in St. Petersburg.

If the two countries continue acting in this spirit of openness and transparency, we should not fear, as there will be no alternative to peaceful space programs.

http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20060405/45356118.html

A LIMITED BALLISTIC MISSILE SYSTEM WITH UNLIMITED CAPABILITIES

15:56

12/ 11/ 2004

MOSCOW (RIA Novosti political commentator Andrei Kislyakov) - By making its choice at the November 2 elections, the US has confirmed its military and political priorities, at least for the next four years. The main one of them, from the viewpoint of military, political and economic consequences, is the NMD program. Bush will continue its implementation.

The program ideology has changed since its revival at the turn of the 21st century, when George W. Bush became US president. After the US withdrew from the 1972 ABM treaty in 2001, the new US administration presented the NMD program as a global national system of ballistic defense, but the word "national" disappeared from the name in late 2002. Since then, it has been called a limited system designed to protect territories in the zone of interests of the US and its allies.

This provision was officially voiced in a special White House memorandum, titled National Policy on Ballistic Missile Defense, which was made public in May 2003. In addition to the US territory proper, the missile defense system should also cover Europe per se, the Middle East as a source of terrorist threat with possible WMD use, and East Asia with the potential threat coming from North Korean (and many other countries, in fact).

These plans are becoming practice now. In summer 2004, the US started deploying killer missiles in Alaska, and on October 4 AP announced that USS Curtis Wilbur of the US 7th Fleet became the first Aegis destroyer to be put on combat duty in the Sea of Japan.

The above can be viewed as the beginning of American offshore measures within the NMD framework, which is turning from a national system on paper to a global system in essence. A signal to action was the 1998 test of a North Korean ballistic missile in the Pacific over the territory of Japan.

The military-technical threat of North Korean missiles to Japan and the US is a vague possibility, while the deterioration of the regional situationis a fact.

The US warships will not be alone in the Sea of Japan for long. In December last year, the Japanese government, reacting to "the growing threat of North Korea," decided to move from research to the creation of components for missiles intercepting ballistic targets jointly with the US. Partner relations have spread to the production of infrared target identification and tracking systems, heat-resistant fairing for anti-missile warheads, booster engines, and kinetic warheads.
"We are not especially worried," Russia's Ambassador to Japan Alexander Panov said in late December 2003. "The system they are creating is rather simple and not very significant strategically. However, it would be better if the system were transparent, so that other states would be able to take part in it."

He apparently meant Russia, which has done a great deal to normalize the situation in the region.

But the process is moving backwards now. China, whose missile and space potential is not questioned any more, is closely watching the Japanese-American plan.

In view of the unresolved China-Taiwan problem, Japanese experience and the recent Chinese promise to resolve the problem of Taiwan by 2020 (by using force, if necessary), it would be naive to think that Taiwan would meekly wait for the future. In June 2004, Taiwanese MPs officially asked the Pentagon about the possibility of acquiring a Patriot-3 air and missile defense system.

In other words, the extension of the US ballistic missile system to East Asia concerns a territory that has seen a high level of conflict for decades. This also effectively rules out transparency.

The interceptors in Alaska and California, American ships patrolling the Sea of Japan, and the future appearance of air and missile defense systems in Japan and possibly in Taiwan constitute a comprehensive system of defense stipulated in the May memorandum. It is unthinkable without a ramified ground-based infrastructure and powerful satellite groups that can cover the entire planet.

The scale of the task presupposes the scale of spending. The US plans to spend about $115 billion on silo-based anti-missiles by 2015. In all, the ballistic missile system, with all its mind-boggling components, will cost more than $1 trillion.

But even a gradual build-up of elements of this system will provoke an unpredictable reaction from America's enemies, the improvement of Russia's strategic nuclear defense capabilities, and many other consequences. After that will come space militarization through the deployment of orbital anti-satellite weapons.

In short, this may be the beginning of a new arms race.

http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20041112/39773179.html

SPACE WEAPONS MUST BE BANNED

16:40

02/ 09/ 2004

MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti political commentator Andrei Kislyakov).

The immediate task of international space legislation is to draft legal norms regulating certain types of human activity in outer space. First of all, this refers to the developmen
t of anti-satellite weapons and the elements of a space-based missile defence system.

It should be noted that neither Russia nor the US has declared its intention to deploy in near-Earth space any weapon systems capable of hitting targets both in space and on our planet. Moreover, at a Geneva session of the Disarmament Conference that was held in late August, Russia's permanent representative Leonid Skotnikov frankly stated, "the Russian Federation has no plans to create space weapon systems and deploy them in outer space. The creation of space weapons is not our choice."

At the same time, he specifically pointed to "obvious loopholes" in international space legislation that allow work on anti-satellite weapons and the elements of a space-based missile defence system to be conducted. This, in turn, is fraught with "the most serious complications and dangers. Why is the disarmament process linked with the military-space subject? Why is it that anti-satellite weapons might upset the military-strategic balance in the world and lead to the militarisation of space?

Firstly, in the late 1990s, a new strategic concept for fighting wars with precision weapons was clearly formulated in the world. Secondly, the US still decided to create a missile defence system, albeit in an abbreviated version.

The connection with anti-satellite weapons is obvious. For a missile defence system to work, just like for precision weapons, the number of satellite support groups must be increased several fold. Considering that experts believe the total number of precision weapons in the more developed countries may reach 30,000-50,000 by 2010, while a new US missile defence system is, under the Memorandum of May 21, 2003, "a systemdesigned to protect the territory of the United States, our Armed Forces and those of our allies", it is easy to imagine the scale of the necessary orbital formations.

In other words, reconnaissance spacecraft, military navigation and weather satellites, as well as early warning satellites, although harmless in themselves, are becoming the components of a weapon system called "precision weapons - missile defence system". Any action is known to cause a reaction. It is quite probable that the world may be thrown back to the 1950s when the two superpowers started accelerating work on space interceptors. However, this time the situation will be more complicated than the bilateral confrontation.

The proposal to draft a treaty to prohibit the deployment of weapons in space, the use or threat of force in relation to space objects, set forth by Russia and China in 2002, is designed to partially fill in the gaps in international space legislation.

Experts in Geneva note that the initiative of Russia and China has received strong support at the Conference, which has 65 member countries. In particular, a Russian proposal to impose a moratorium on the deployment of weapons in space until the international community reaches a respective agreement on space weapons has been met with aproval.

http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20040902/39768364.html

SPACE WEAPONS MUST BE BANNED

16:39

02/ 09/ 2004

MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti political commentator Andrei Kislyakov).

The immediate task of international space legislation is to draft legal norms regulating certain types of human activity in outer space. First of all, this refers to the development of anti-satellite weapons and the elements of a space-based missile defence system.

It should be noted that neither Russia nor the US has declared its intention to deploy in near-Earth space any weapon systems capable of hitting targets both in space and on our planet. Moreover, at a Geneva session of the Disarmament Conference that was held in late August, Russia's permanent representative Leonid Skotnikov frankly stated, "the Russian Federation has no plans to create space weapon systems and deploy them in outer space. The creation of space weapons is not our choice."

At the same time, he specifically pointed to "obvious loopholes" in international space legislation that allow work on anti-satellite weapons and the elements of a space-based missile defence system to be conducted. This, in turn, is fraught with "the most serious complications and dangers. Why is the disarmament process linked with the military-space subject? Why is it that anti-satellite weapons might upset the military-strategic balance in the world and lead to the militarisation of space?

Firstly, in the late 1990s, a new strategic concept for fighting wars with precision weapons was clearly formulated in the world. Secondly, the US still decided to create a missile defence system, albeit in an abbreviated version.

The connection with anti-satellite weapons is obvious. For a missile defence system to work, just like for precision weapons, the number of satellite support groups must be increased several fold.

Considering that experts believe the total number of precision weapons in the more developed countries may reach 30,000-50,000 by 2010, while a new US missile defence system is, under the Memorandum of May 21, 2003, "a systemdesigned to protect the territory of the United States, our Armed Forces and those of our allies", it is easy to imagine the scale of the necessary orbital formations.

In other words, reconnaissance spacecraft, military navigation and weather satellites, as well as early warning satellites, although harmless in themselves, are becoming the components of a weapon system called "precision weapons - missile defence system".

Any action is known to cause a reaction.

It is quite probable that the world may be thrown back to the 1950s when the two superpowers started accelerating work on space interceptors. However, this time the situation will be more complicated than the bilateral confrontation.

The proposal to draft a treaty to prohibit the deployment of weapons in space, the use or threat of force in relation to space objects, set forth by Russia and China in 2002, is designed to partially fill in the gaps in international space legislation.

Experts in Geneva note that the initiative of Russia and China has received strong support at the Conference, which has 65 member countries. In particular, a Russian proposal to impose a moratorium on the deployment of weapons in space until the international community reaches a respective agreement on space weapons has been met with aproval.

http://en.rian.ru/onlinenews/20040902/39768363.html