Look Out Below. The Arms Race in Space May Be On.

By STEVEN LEE MYERS

Erik T. Johnson

IT doesn’t take much imagination to realize how badly war in space could unfold. An enemy — say, China in a confrontation over Taiwan, or Iran staring down America over the Iranian nuclear program — could knock out the American satellite system in a barrage of antisatellite weapons, instantly paralyzing American troops, planes and ships around the world.

Space itself could be polluted for decades to come, rendered unusable.

The global economic system would probably collapse, along with air travel and communications. Your cellphone wouldn’t work. Nor would your A.T.M. and that dashboard navigational gizmo you got for Christmas. And preventing an accidental nuclear exchange could become much more difficult.

“The fallout, if you will, could be tremendous,” said Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association in Washington.

The consequences of war in space are in fact so cataclysmic that arms control advocates like Mr. Kimball would like simply to prohibit the use of weapons beyond the earth’s atmosphere.

But it may already be too late for that. In the weeks since an American rocket slammed into an out-of-control satellite over the Pacific Ocean, officials and experts have made it clear that the United States, for better or worse, is already committed to having the capacity to wage war in space. And that, it seems likely, will prompt others to keep pace.

What makes people want to ban war in space is exactly what keeps the Pentagon’s war planners busy preparing for it: The United States has become so dependent on space that it has become the country’s Achilles’ heel.

“Our adversaries understand our dependence upon space-based capabilities,” Gen. Kevin P. Chilton, commander of the United States Strategic Command, wrote in Congressional testimony on Feb. 27, “and we must be ready to detect, track, characterize, attribute, predict and respond to any threat to our space infrastructure.”

Whatever Pentagon assurances there have been to the contrary, the destruction of a satellite more than 130 miles above the Pacific Ocean a week earlier, on Feb. 20, was an extraordinary display of what General Chilton had in mind — a capacity that the Pentagon under President Bush has tenaciously sought to protect and enlarge.

Is war in space inevitable? The idea or such a war has been around since Sputnik, but for most of the cold war it remained safely within the realm of science fiction and the carefully proscribed American-Soviet arms race.

That is changing. A dozen countries now can reach space with satellites — and, therefore, with weapons. China strutted its stuff in January 2007 by shooting down one of its own weather satellites 530 miles above the planet.

“The first era of the space age was one of experimentation and discovery,” a Congressional commission reported just before President Bush took office in 2001. “We are now on the threshold of a new era of the space age, devoted to mastering operations in space.”

One of the authors of that report was Mr. Bush’s first defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, and the policy it recommended became a tenet of American policy: The United States should develop “new military capabilities for operation to, from, in and through space.”

Technology, too, has become an enemy of peace in space. Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative was considered so fantastical by its critics 25 years ago that it was known as “Star Wars.” But the programs Mr. Reagan began were the ancestors of the weaponry that brought down the American satellite.

The Chinese strike, and now the Pentagon’s, have given ammunition to both sides of the debate over war in orbit.

Arms control advocates say the bull’s-eyes underscore the need to expand the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which the United States and 90 other countries have ratified. It bans the use of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on the Moon.

Space, in this view, should remain a place for exploration and research, not humanity’s destructive side. The grim potential of the latter was hinted at by the vast field of debris that China’s test left, posing a threat to any passing satellite or space ship. (The Pentagon said its own shot, at a lower altitude, would not have the same effect — the debris would fall to earth and burn up.)

he risk posed by space junk was the main reason the United States and Soviet Union abandoned antisatellite tests in the 1980’s. Michael Krepon, who has written on the militarization of space, said the Chinese test broke an unofficial moratorium that had lasted since then. And he expressed disappointment that the Pentagon’s strike had damaged support for a ban — which the Chinese say they want, in spite of their 2007 test. “The truth of the matter is it doesn’t take too many satellite hits to create a big mess in low earth orbit,” he said.

The White House, on the other hand, opposes a treaty proscribing space weaponry; Mr. Bush’s press secretary, Dana M. Perino, says it would be unenforceable, noting that even a benign object put in orbit could become a weapon if it rammed another satellite.

A new American president could reverse that attitude, but he or she would have to go up against the generals and admirals, contractors, lawmakers and others who strongly support the goal of keeping American superiority in space. The reason they cite is that the United States depends more than any other country on space for its national security. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that an M1-A1 tank couldn’t drive around the block in Iraq without them.

And so, research continues on how to protect American satellites and deny the wartime use of satellites to potential enemies — including work on lasers and whiz-bang stuff like cylinders of hardened material that could be hurled from space to targets on the ground. “Rods from God,” those are called.

For now, such weapons remain untested and, by all accounts, impractical because the cost of putting a weapon in orbit is huge. “It is much easier to hold a target at risk from the land or sea than from space,” said Elliot G. Pulham, who heads the Space Foundation, a nonprofit group in Colorado Springs.

Democrats in Congress, in particular, have opposed explicit authorization of space weapons programs. But John E. Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, an organization that studies military and space issues, has noted a spike in recent years in secret “black budget” spending by the Missile Defense Agency. The idea, he said, is, “If you desire peace, prepare for war.”

Mike Moore, author of a new book, “Twilight War: The Folly of U.S. Space Dominance,” argued that such logic is misguided. The belief that the United States can or should dominate space, he said, only prods others to respond.

“Why trigger an arms race?” he asked. “The United States has the most satellites up there, and we have the most to lose.” Nevertheless, he acknowledges, “These kinds of thing have a momentum of their own.”

GLOBAL VIEW By BRET STEPHENS

A President, Not a Symbol

Sometime before Barack Obama's middle name slipped into the realm of the unmentionable, it was supposed to be a selling point of his candidacy. "Well, I think if you've got a guy named Barack Hussein Obama, that's a pretty good contrast to George W. Bush," Mr. Obama told PBS's Tavis Smiley on October 18, 2007. "If you believe that we've got to heal America and we've got to repair our standing in the world, then I think my supporters believe that I am the messenger who can deliver that message."

There are many reasons the idea of an Obama presidency appeals to so many Americans, and not the least of them is that it appeals to so many non-Americans. He blends his several identities so seamlessly as to seem to be part everything -- and so for everyone, everywhere, to feel as if they have a part of him. He combines style, eloquence, youth and a common touch in a way the world hasn't seen in an American president since 1961. His soft-left brand of foreign policy, with its emphasis on global "challenges" rather than American interests, is broadly appealing to the rest of the world (or at least the segment that's in the business of writing op-eds that are later quoted back to American audiences).

AP

And he is a symbol. Japan and Britain have monarchs, and Israel and Italy have presidents, whose function is to represent the dignity and continuity of a nation above the political fray. But in the U.S. the functions of head of state and head of government are combined. As a head of state, if not yet of government, Mr. Obama seems to have requisite qualifications.

The question is whether the virtues that Mr. Obama would bring to the Oval Office as a symbol will translate into effectiveness as a president. The strong argument that they will rests on Harvard professor Joseph Nye's notion of "soft power": The idea that America's real strength rests not so much on its ability to impose -- as it can and often does through the military and economic tools of hard power -- but on its ability to attract. In this reading, Mr. Obama offers a double dollop of global promise, both because of who he is and because of what he says he will do: Talk to Hugo Chávez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; shut down Guantanamo; reduce carbon emissions and so on.

Maybe all that will come to pass, and maybe all will be well. Clearly an Obama victory will mean that the U.S. will be better liked (or less disliked) in places like Britain and Germany, where the Illinois senator is often billed as a new Jack Kennedy or even Abraham Lincoln.

Less clear is whether Mr. Obama will be able to retain that sympathy. A man who seeks the presidency out of the audacity of hope gives himself little room to be "misunderestimated." The expectations are titanic, or Titanic. What happens to Obama-as-symbol when he actually has to govern, negotiate, settle for the unhappy and piecemeal compromises that are what democracy is about? What happens when he has to choose between the interests of his domestic constituencies -- on trade, for example, or the awarding of defense contracts -- and the interests of America's neighbors and allies? What happens when he has to bomb Pakistan for real, rather than in a Beltway policy address?

The challenge Mr. Obama faces here is one reason Machiavelli warns his Prince about the dangers of being loved: "A wise ruler should rely on the emotion he can control, not on the one he cannot." Machiavelli, for one, understood that nothing is so sour as a soured love.

That's not to say that it hurts to be liked. But here, too, it's not clear that the affection that Mr. Obama seems so effortlessly to inspire necessarily inspires it to America's advantage. European admiration for Bill Clinton only seemed to increase after the Monica Lewinsky scandal, but largely because he was seen as a simpatico politician hounded by America's puritanical masses. Mr. Clinton's popularity, in other words, was a kind of refracted signal of a deeper anti-Americanism.

There is also the question of whose affections we really need, as opposed to the affections we seek. Though the vanities of American tourists and expats may at times be wounded in Parisian cafés, the fallout for American interests is unlikely to be great. Five years ago, on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, it seemed it might. Millions of Europeans poured into the streets to protest the war, and Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schröder and Vladimir Putin formed a kind of coalition of the unwilling to obstruct U.S. purposes. That coalition did not endure. Mr. Chirac is under investigation, Mr. Schröder works for Mr. Putin, and Europe is a bit wiser about the merits of a trans-Atlantic alliance.

As for the uses of soft power toward America's enemies, no less an authority than Prof. Nye has pointed out that "North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il's penchant for Hollywood movies is unlikely to affect his decision on developing nuclear weapons." Similarly, America and American culture is wildly popular in Iran today, and U.S. visitors to Iran invariably report being warmly received. But that has not altered the regime's attitude toward the Great Satan (much less the Little Satan), and may have even hardened its repression of its own people.

Mr. Nye makes another useful point: Soft power is not necessarily self-begetting. Governments, he notes, "can control and change foreign policies . . . They can promote, but not control, popular culture." Ultimately, America is liked, or disliked, for what it is, far more so than for what this or that president does. On the other hand, Mr. Nye does believe that hard power can beget soft power. "The efficiency of the initial U.S. military invasion of Iraq in 2003 created admiration in the eyes of some foreigners," he writes, while it was the bungling of the aftermath that squandered it. Being liked does not mean you will do well. But doing well does mean you will, over time, be liked.

Still, it's not altogether true that the U.S. Constitution does not provide for a mostly symbolic high office. As with monarchies, there is one office that uniquely combines legislative and executive functions, albeit with little real power in either, and that historically has been used for the purposes of representing America to the world, usually at funerals. It's called the vice presidency. Mr. Obama says he's not interested.