Nuclear space threat. (Up front: news and opinion from independent minds).

At first glance, the preoccupation of the Bush administration with missile defense seems to make no sense. As retired Rear Admiral Eugene J. Carroll Jr. of the Center for Defense Information in Washington, D.C., notes, "The least likely threat we face is some third-rate nation developing an ICBM and launching it at the United States knowing they will get back fifty times what they send." He observed that smuggling in a nuclear bomb in a suitcase would be a cheaper, more reliable way to inflict harm and to avoid instantaneous retaliation.

The importance of missile "defense" to George W. Bush and to Donald Rumsfeld, his Secretary of Defense, is as a foot-in-the-door toward militarizing space. That connection is easy to make. Until Rumsfeld resigned to become Defense Secretary, he had chaired the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States. That group, which came to be known as the Rumsfeld Commission, claimed that "rogue states" posed such a threat and warned in a report issued in 2001 of a "Space Pearl Harbor." Ostensibly to prevent such an attack, the report warns that "in the coming period the U.S. will conduct operations to, from, in, and through space in support of its national interests both on the earth and in space," making response possible "to events anywhere in the world." The report recommends that the Pentagon's U.S. Space Command, whose motto is "Master of Space," become a Space Corps modeled after the Marine Corps and then, possibly, a separate Space Department equal to the army, navy, and air force.

This Rumsfeld report follows a series of U.S. military reports laying out plans for space weapons. Visions of 2020, produced for the Space Command website, begins with a crawl that reads:

   U.S. Space Command--dominating the space dimension of military operations
   to protect U.S. interests and investment. Integrating Space Forces into
   warfighting capabilities across the full spectrum of conflict.

At about the same time, General Joseph Ashy, then commander in chief of the Space Command, told an aerospace publication, "Some people don't want to hear this and it sure isn't in vogue, but--absolutely--we're going to fight in space. We're going to fight from space, and we're going to fight into space." Republican Senator Bob Smith of New Hampshire agrees. "Space is our next manifest destiny," he says.

With the end of the Cold War it seemed that human beings had succeeded in preventing the cataclysm of all-out nuclear war. This achievement is now jeopardized by the threat of expansion into space of awesome warfighting technology, in blatant defiance of the Outer Space Treaty directed at preserving space for peaceful purposes. The military has been preparing for this for a long time; development of space-based lasers, for example, began decades ago. But the public remains poorly informed, deliberately misled by the smokescreen of "defense." It's late, but not too late, to raise public awareness and to stop a new arms race with ever more destructive weapons on a vastly expanded battlefield.

Albert L. Huebner ihas taught physics for more than twenty years at California State University of Northridge and was appointed contributing writer for Toward Freedom in 1995.