Noting a part of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney's speech at the Citadel that proposed the creation of a "multilayered" missile defense system, Space and defense analyst Taylor Dinerman suggests the candidate has proposed weapons in space.
The idea of a missile defense system with a space based component is as old as President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative proposal in the early 1980s. The idea was that anti missiles weapons in space could hit a ballistic missile in the boost phase, before it had released its warheads and decoy systems. Any missiles that penetrated this first layer would be attacked by mid course and terminal phase weapons, most of which would be sea based and land based.
SDI looked at a variety of exotic weapons systems, including lasers and particle beam weapons. One x-ray laser system would have been ignited by the explosions of small, nuclear bombs.
The first Bush administration examined a concept called "Brilliant Pebbles" that eschewed beam weapons in favor of small, kinetic kill vehicles that would vector in on missiles and destroy them by colliding with them, using the impetus created by gravity to enhance its velocity and thus its destructive power.
The Clinton administration effectively killed any kind of space based missile defense system. The second Bush administration, while it withdrew from the ABM treaty that had hampered the development of missile defenses, did not try to revive the space based element, sticking to land and sea based systems. The Obama administration has cut back development of even those systems.
The prospect of a global thermonuclear war which the original SDI was designed to combat is long vanished. Indeed the very prospect of an American missile defense system helped to concentrate the attention of Soviet leaders on the technological disparity it had with the United States. This in turn led to a more accommodating attitude toward arms control, the Gorbachev era "perestoika" reforms, and the eventual fall of the Soviet Union.
The nuclear threat now comes from rogue nations, such as Iran and North Korea, and the rising super power of China. However space based weapons would be crucial in turning back even a limited attack from one or more of these powers.
Dinerman suggests that a President Romney would have a lot of political opposition, foreign and domestic, if he is serious about proposing space based weapons. However, the counter argument is that by blunting the potency of ballistic missile systems in the hands of hostile government, peace and security are enhanced.
Incidentally, commercial space supporters would love the development of space based weapons. Deploying and maintaining such platforms would be just another market for the nascent commercial space sector.
Mark R. Whittington is the author of Children of Apollo and The Last Moonwalker. He has written on space subjects for a variety of periodicals, including The Houston Chronicle, The Washington Post , USA Today, the L.A. Times, and The Weekly Standard.
There are no comments yet