Nuke War Watch: Arms race shadow

PHILADELPHIA, Aug. 7 (UPI) -- In December 1957 I was a private first-class in the U.S. Army stationed at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii. We had a Russian kid in our unit, and when we weren't on guard duty or peeling potatoes, he would translate programs for us from Radio Moscow.

Right before Christmas, we heard a narrator telling a story to some children. He said, "Aloysha, look up in the sky. There are three moons, and two of them are Russian."

We were in the Space Age! The Russians had just put up their first sputniks, pre-empting the Americans much to their acute dismay. The Americans, not to be outdone, launched their own satellites early in 1958. Though they were not as large or impressive as the Russians', the space race had begun.

In May 1958, released from the Army and having passed all my exams and my security check, I entered the U.S. Foreign Service to begin my career as a diplomat. My first assignment was with the U.N. Political Office of the State Department in Washington. The subject of my assignment: the international control of outer space.

It was an exciting time. The United States and the Soviet Union had just begun to explore this new world, which began where satellites could orbit around the Earth and then extended to the farthest reaches of the universe. It was a time that could be compared to another era, when an Italian explorer, Christopher Columbus, discovered that our planet was not flat, but across its oceans existed a new world.

What would follow? Would the nations of the world do what they did after 1492: arm themselves to the teeth and carve up this new world into colonies and empires? Would we see the Americans and Soviets in a mad rush to claim their very own planets and various sections of space? Would other powers make similar claims? Would the great powers begin to fight wars in outer space?

Today, as the United States moves to weaponize outer space, I am asking the same questions I asked 50 years ago: Will we arm outer space as we have armed the land, seas and airspace? Are we heading toward wars in this new area? "War In Heaven," my new book co-authored with Helen Caldicott, is an attempt to frame the moral and political issues that these questions raise: Will arming outer space increase the world's security? Do we need to weaponize outer space? In the end we argue that weaponizing outer space will make the world far more dangerous than it is now.

We will be far less secure with space weapons than without them, because arming outer space will assuredly start an arms race in space and possibly provoke a dreadful war. If we are to avoid this "star wars," we must act now. Let us not arm the heavens but keep them for peaceful purposes and for the solace and wonder that they have always provided.

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(Craig Eisendrath is the chair of the Project for Nuclear Awareness and co-founder of the National Constitution Center. This piece originally appears in Helen Caldicott and Craig Eisendrath's book, "War in Heaven: The Arms Race in Outer Space," and is published with the permission of The New Press.)

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