These space weapons sounds more like military pork-spending rather than a dire need for national security and defense.


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The Air Force, saying it must secure space to protect the nation from attack, is seeking President Bush's approval of a national-security directive that could move the United States closer to fielding offensive and defensive space weapons, according to White House and Air Force officials.

The proposed change would be a substantial shift in American policy. It would almost certainly be opposed by many American allies and potential enemies, who have said it may create an arms race in space.

A senior administration official said that a new presidential directive would replace a 1996 Clinton administration policy that emphasized a more pacific use of space, including spy satellites' support for military operations, arms control and nonproliferation pacts.

Any deployment of space weapons would face financial, technological, political and diplomatic hurdles, although no treaty or law bans Washington from putting weapons in space, barring weapons of mass destruction.

A presidential directive is expected within weeks, said the senior administration official, who is involved with space policy and insisted that he not be identified because the directive is still under final review and the White House has not disclosed its details.

Air Force officials said yesterday that the directive, which is still in draft form, did not call for militarizing space. "The focus of the process is not putting weapons in space," said Maj. Karen Finn, an Air Force spokeswoman, who said that the White House, not the Air Force, makes national policy. "The focus is having free access in space."

With little public debate, the Pentagon has already spent billions of dollars developing space weapons and preparing plans to deploy them.

"We haven't reached the point of strafing and bombing from space," Pete Teets, who stepped down last month as the acting secretary of the Air Force, told a space warfare symposium last year. "Nonetheless, we are thinking about those possibilities."

In January 2001, a commission led by Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the newly nominated defense secretary, recommended that the military should "ensure that the president will have the option to deploy weapons in space."

It said that "explicit national security guidance and defense policy is needed to direct development of doctrine, concepts of operations and capabilities for space, including weapons systems that operate in space."

The effort to develop a new policy directive reflects three years of work prompted by the report. The White House would not say if all the report's recommendations would be adopted.

In 2002, after weighing the report of the Rumsfeld space commission, President Bush withdrew from the 30-year-old Antiballistic Missile Treaty, which banned space-based weapons.

I'm all for the SDI/Star Wars. Neutralizing the effect of nuclear weapons would put the US in a good position defensively. Especially if we were super-cool about it and made a net of missile defense satellites that would neutralize nukes anywhere on the globe in defense of any country -- it takes them off the table (except for dirty bombs and ground ignitions).

Other than that, yes, I do think it's Pork.

<font color = lightgreen>The magnitude of the cost will be outdone only by the magnitude of the failure of the first tests of these pieces of science-fiction ridiculousness. Then, I am going to laugh my arse off! [img]graemlins/petard.gif[/img] </font>

Stopping nukes is but one element. Conventional bombing from space is a key area of interest according to the article and some others. Combat Satellites hunting other satellites is a potential future conflict. This type of warfare would create huge amounts of dangerous fast moving space-junk in orbit. This is already a problem without weapons and war in space.
An arms race in space that led to conflict could be devastating. At the least say bye bye to GPS, TV, and Weather Satellites.

There is gotta be a better way to be safe from nuclear missles and we already have missles and bombers.


It's worse than pork, it's rotten pork.

Which is good, it scares the Arabs and Jews away, they hate pork. :D

Not that kind of pork they don't. ;)

American space weapon projects have been going on for awhile. This is an image from an Russian spy satellite showing US' latest space toy:

http://www.theforce.net/swtc/Pix/books/weg/dstc3.gif

:D

It's funny, I've heard from a few sources that one of the primary reasons for the lunar landing was to establish a rail-gun type behemoth on the moon, a weapon system that could launch rocks at nearly any place on earth, that would hit with the force of a decent sized nuke (depending on the size of the rock) without fallout, radiation hazards, etc. would have been interesting to see it come to fruition, would have been very similar in effect to the pic above this post.

Yeah, wel, if you believe that, then certainly you believe that the whole Lunar Landing was faked to begin with.

never said I believed it, just that it was a theory I had heard.