The COPUOS treaty has not hindered the U.S. under Reagan and Bush from pursuing the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), more colloquially known as "Star Wars." The idea would be to deploy space-based X-ray laser sattelites and projectile systems for 'shooting' down interballistic missles before they can reach their target. While Reagan characterized such a defense as a 'shield,' most physicists see it as having so many problems in both the technological and strategic area that they call it a 'sieve.' At best, it might be able, according to some computer models, to take out 20 to 40% of incoming warheads. But, as with any system, there are countermeasures, and multiple warhead systems (MIRVs), decoy missles, and enemy ASATs might reduce even that level of effectiveness. Most scientists were afraid, especially during the Cold War, of "Star Wars" destabilizing effect as a concept. An enemy which even thought that a country was on the verge of creating such a shield might feel they were prepared to launch a 'first strike,' and they might feel pressured to launch an 'anticipatory' strike to prevent it!
Many scientists are afraid that militarization of space also represents a territorialization. While there are UN treaties to restrain the nations of the world from taking what is in the seas or in Antartica for their own, there is no real set of agreements that declares space to be the common heritage of mankind. So, could nations then declare the sovereignty of the space above their countries, even as they do over their 'airspace'? Would they then declare the right to control all space launches or orbital paths that enter that zone? If wealth is located in space - say in the asteroid belt - will nations also go to war in space over who owns it? When nations begin settling in space - either in permanently manned stations or in lunar colonies - will there be conflict over docking rights? The militarization of space is a bad trend, away from where mankind should be going - declaring space to be the place where our lines on Earthly maps should not matter.
The Pentagon also wants to computerize the chain of command at higher levels than delivery - specifically, in the coordination of C3I - communciations, control, and intelligence - which are so important in fighting a war. Afraid that nuclear war could claim the lives of the commander-in-chief and most of their own war-planners, and paralyze computer networks and other electronic systems through an EMP surge, the Pentagon has spent a lot of change developing MILSTAR. MILSTAR is supposed to be a system of sattelites that are supposed to make nuclear war-fighting strategies once most of the existing C3I has been wiped out; in short the Pentagon is trying to develop the computer in 'War Games,' which will fight WW IV. With computers giving the orders, the chain of command in a complex situation like a 'limited' nuclear strike - which may require hundreds of decisions in a few minutes - is supposed to be 'simplified.' But what happens when computers make mistakes, as when the NORAD radar confused a gaggle of geese for incoming missiles?
People who have seen the movies "Short Circuit" or "Terminator 2" may laugh at the idea that the Pentagon is developing 'robot warriors' that will 'carry a bomb into the heart of Moscow'. But the Pentagon is funding university studies of Artificial Intelligence (AI) research and also cognitive science (CS) research projects seeking to find computer algorithms that will duplicate human vision and motion-response, precisely for that reason. Realizing that as the lethality and scale of warfare has grown exponentially in the 20th century, the Pentagon war-planners may also feel that soldiers have become less and less able to execute it. Better to have robots that do not question orders and can withstand much more damage than humans. It is very possible that one such project in the future may be to develop androids which are perfect human simulacra, for covert warfare purposes. In that sense, perhaps Terminator 2 may be very prescient. Will we surrender our authority to some omniscient 'Skynet' to fight all our wars, only to have it turn against us?
Once again anticipating (or responding to) science fiction, the Pentagon has seriously looked into the development of 'bionic' additions to its soldiers. There are already exoskeleton prototypes out there that may magnify the strenght of their operators tenfold. It is not unreasonable to find in the future that prostheses might be developed with greater tensile strength than human limbs, or artificial eyes that see in other EM spectra or have greater magnificatory power. (a la "Six Million Dollar Man"?) Perhaps the next step for creating the perfect soldier are cyborgs, who may be outfitted with electronic implants for receiving and carrying out orders. Fantastic, but not impossible.
He is not the first person to consider the use of such techniques, however. The Pentagon used the defoliant Agent Orange to erode the jungles of VietNam, ostensibly to expose the guerillas underneath their cover. In practice, Agent Orange and other defoliants are used for more deliberate, and savage reasons - to destroy food crops or defoliate other plants upon which communities depend. The military has also explored the use of climate control in conflict - searching for ways to create drought, hurricanes, or tidal waves which might be directed toward the enemy so as to cause destruction. Subtle methods of decreasing rainfall, raising temperature, or chaging soil composition might also damage agriculture and paralyze economic production. The use of "weather warfare" has obvious advantages: how can you prove that a tornado which devastated your country was 'sent' by an enemy to cause that destruction?
The military, as one of the world's largest polluters, is quite aware of the problem of toxins in the environment. It has commissioned many stuides of toxicology, but not necessarily for the reason of cleaning up its mess. Imagine the effectiveness of introducing small amounts of a toxic substance into key species in an enemy's ecosystem, then allowing it to build up in the food chain until the whole ecosystem is ruined. Or subtly allowing radiation to build up in the environment by spreading low-level radioactive waste over a battlefield. Such radiation would be invisible (except to a Geiger counter) and be very effective. I would not be surprised if the Pentagon is working on it right now. It is also now widely believed that underground nuclear detonations may be able to trigger earthquakes elsewhere on the planet. Might this be the reason that underground nuclear testing was continued up until very recently?
But psychochemicals were by no means the only means of behavioral warfare being explored by the military. Fascinated by the behaviorist idea of conditioning, the military tried to explore the 'programming' of the human brain, and examined ways in which - through deprivation, sensory isolation, or punishment-and-reward - it might be made a "blank slate" for receiving new programs. The military was fascinated by the possibility of developing a Manchurian Candidate - an assassin from the enemy who could be 'brainwashed' into killing its enemies. To that end, the Army also explored hypnosis, the effect of ELF waves on human brain frequencies, and the use of sounds as signals to 'trigger' specific behavioral responses. Other low-tech methods of exercising power, such as entrapment, intimidation, and coercion, continue to be explored. There was also a great deal of research into "psychoacoustic" technology, involving the use of induced audial hallucinations and disorientation created by infrasonics or microwave technology. Such "directed-energy" weapons may well be battlefield-tested someday for behavioral warfare ops.
Other forms of non-behavioral psychological warfare revolve around what might be called 'disinformation' or propaganda. An important part of fighting an enemy is feeding them false knowledge and misdirecting them with false facts. But even in peacetime propaganda can serve to demoralize, destabilize, and divide internally a hostile enemy. Various techniques have been explored - the use of false rumours, doctored photographs and images, and "planted" news stories - fall into this category. The U.S. military in Nicaragua was accused of distributing a handbook which described vividly the arts of industrial sabotage. In Panama, they used rock music to drive Noriega out of a church where he had taken refuge, which may be the ultimate form of psychological warfare.
In the biological warfare realm, Army technicians worked with genetically-altered microbes - disease bacteria and viruses - in the hopes of creating infectious diseases which were even more pathogenic and virulent than normal. Some even feel they experimented with 'ethnic warfare' - biological agents that may be more effective on certain racial groups due to their blood type, genetic makeup, etc. - and that AIDs may have come out of this research. One project in this vein may have been the Tuskegee Experiment, during which black men were exposed to a paticularly potent strain of syphillis, without their knowledge. The attempts may have been to create a disease strain - such as a mutant form of anthrax - which would not respond to the standard medical treatment because of its genetic modification. The possibilities in this realm are truly frightening.
Having long since faced up to the fact that the hydrogen bomb makes a nuclear war unwinnable and a 'limited exchange' nearly impossible, the Pentagon has tried to develop a 'flexible response' which might allow us to initiate a nuclear war and win it. Components of this strategy include 'first-strike' hard-penetrating weapons like the Trident missile, mobile-launched missiles such as the MX or submarine-fired IBCM, multiple-target MIRVs, zero-tech damage Neutron Bombs, and antiballistic missile (ABM) systems. The idea would be to launch a nuclear attack which would be rapid and undetected, would take out the enemy's ability to respond, and create a unilateral victory. While neither side claims they would initiate a first strike, during the Cold War the U.S. tried to develop ways that it could, and so did the Soviets. Perhaps neither side knew how dangerous that was, or how likely it was to provoke the enemy toward more rapid and irresponsible judgements because they would feel they had to respond immediately.
Many so-called 'tactical' nuclear weapons - for battlefield or "theater" use - have been deployed in crisis situations. Their use was certainly contemplated in Iraq. But many of the ordinary munitions used in the air war carried explosive potentials close to that of nuclear weapons: a greater amount of explosives were dropped on Baghdad than were used in all of WW II. Particularly deadly were Fuel-Air Explosives which would create firestorms that would suck all the oxygen out of bunkers, and Cluster Bombs which would spread around 'incendiary' bomblets over large areas. These munitions are so destructive that they may obtain some of the secondary effects associated with the use of nuclear weapons - the psychological demoralization of the enemy.
The Navy has been very interested in propulsion systems that might allow a submarine to move silently (perhaps by countering wave turbulence, etc.) and shielding techniques that might deflect sonar waves. A "stealth" submarine may be in the works, able to sneak up on other subs undetected. It is not unfeasible to imagine that one might be able to "stealthize" a land vehicle, though this has not been attempted, mainly because once over the horizon any land vehicle is quite visible, and cannot strike as fast as a plane or a submarine. Camouflage, radar jamming, chaff, electronic countermeasures, and other techiques have long been used by the military to hide its forces from the enemy. "Stealth" technology is an attempt to take the quest for invisibility one step further. As to whether the Army has developed a technique for visual invisibility... they certainly aren't telling.
Nonetheless, there do appear to be more developments in the 'black programs' in the aerospace field. If and when "Aurora" makes its appearance, it is expected to be able to do upwards of Mach 5 or 6 - it is a hypersonic plane built, according to certain sources, on the 'waverider' principle, utilizing "pulsed wave detonation engines" that employ a unique means of external combustion. Such a hypersonic plane, even if not radar-invisible, would have little trouble penetrating most air defenses at such velocities, and probably could strike with complete anonymity - who would be able to identify the markings on the plane at that speed? Further, such a plane might have to be a "drone" piloted by computers, since a human pilot might have a tough time reacting quickly enough or surviving the inertial acceleration. And it would once again put the act of war out of the hands of human decisionmaking.
An important part of LIC is economic warfare, focusing on attempts to disrupt the economy of the enemy's country (and thereby hopefully destabilize his political regime.) While many countries often use forms of economic coercion prior to the use of war, such as tarriffs, sanctions, freezing of foreign assets, expropriation of property, and blockades, these techniques can often be used in conjunction with others for devastating effect. Some of the methods used in LIC include flooding the enemy country with bogus currency to create inflation, sabotage of factories and other production facilities, disruption of trade routes and transportation networks (such as railroads), resource depletion, and the use of 1980s-style "junk bonds" to create false debt in the economy. This strategy can often paralyze the opponent's economy, creating vast amounts of misery, but equally vast challenges to his authority.
The CIA, recognizing the economic battlefield as the next possible field of war, has begun to devote important amounts of intelligence to industrial sabotage and espionage. They know that the techniques employed by the U.S. to cripple foreign economies could be used against us. Most current LIC efforts involve a complex coordination of proxy fighting, economic warfare, and covert support to foreign political parties, trade unions, and "think tanks" supporting a pro-American policy for their government. This, combined with some vote-rigging, electoral fraud, and outright poll-place coercion, can often produce the desired result. Amazingly, Americans bark at the role foreign lobbyists play in their deliberative process - but consider what a hue and cry there would be if it was found out that Mexico gave the Republicans thousands of dollars for their campaign and paid for anti-Democrat advertisements in the U.S.! Yet we do this kind of thing in the Third World all the time.
Yet the Pentagon's praises of the potential for 'nonlethal' hitech warfare deserve several grains of salt. There are many drawbacks to so-called "nonlethal" weapons. There are, after all, "fates worse than death." Is it truly preferable to be permanently blinded by lasers, deafened by infrasonics, or maimed or disabled by some other technology designed not to kill? Further, the infrastructure that maintains a nation's war machine also supports its people in peacetime: "infrastructure targeting" can cause high additional "collateral damage" from disease, hunger, and social breakdown, as we can see from postwar Iraq. And weapons designed to disable can accidentally kill - as when your paralyzed tank is slammed into by the tank behind you. "Nonlethal" weapons might be quite lethal in certain circumstances (which one might or might not categorize as unavoidable.)
It is fairly obvious that any weapon with a "nonlethal" setting (just like Star Trek- 'set phasers on stun') could easily be augmented for a lethal one. (Low-intensity lasers could be amplified and refocused.) Distinguishing between lethal and nonlethal weapons on the battlefield might not be so easy to do. Such nonlethal technologies may backfire in numerous ways (such as when chemical agents dropped on 'their' side are carried by prevailing winds back over to 'ours') and exacerbate the problem of "friendly fire." And nonlethal weapons are quite simply more likely to be used in a conflict situation, since their usage might not attract the same international criticism as conventional warfare. Possession of "nonlethal" weapons may encourage conflicts rather than forestall them, and one might consider that opponents may not be so generous as to retaliate to 'nonlethal' weapons with similarly nonlethal "attacks." "Nonlethal" weapons may end up making life on this planet much more lethal.
Will the new high-tech battlefields of the 21st century be outer space? Will there be wars over possession of the moon, 'orbital rights', or the resources of the asteroid belt? Will nation-states carve up the heavens much as they have the seas and most of the surface of the earth? "Star Wars" is a highly frightening reality, very different from the movies. In space, there is almost no friction to slow down the momentum of objects. If a sattelite were to be blown apart, there would be a hail of fragments preceding outward at thousands of miles an hour. Some of those fragments would continue to orbit around the Earth at the same velocity as initial impact. If they slammed into a civilian rocket ship (such as our Shuttle) the cabin might depressurize and all the oxygen in the vessel would rush out in a wave of explosive decompression. It would be a highly deadly affair. Our astronauts have enough to worry about, with cosmic rays, micrometeorites, and tons of "space junk" as existing space problems.
I suspect that in the future, increasingly corporatized universities will get more and more of their funds to do R & D for the DOD, all academic ethics and ethical problems aside. The university has been made a full partner in the military-industrial complex. Despite protests against university research on napalm in VietNam, and continuing demonstrations against work on nuclear weapons, the 'marriage' between academia and the military seems to be proceeding apace. There will be more and more penetration of the military into the fields of aerospace, electronics, and materials research. As a result, more and more scientific research will become classified material hidden in the "black budget." Sadly, technology has been a handmaiden of war ever since DaVinci. Perhaps someday it can be the companion of peace.
The Pentagon also announced it was going into the 'cyberwar' business. They are going to try and develop viruses and worm programs which are designed to directly attack an enemy's C3I capability, knocking out critical systems. Further, they are going to develop a coordinated strategy for monitoring security threats on the Internet - mentioning several domestic groups, including UFO enthusiasts, which would require more extreme electronic surveillance. Finally, part of their 'cyberwar' program seems to involve the more stepped-up dissemination of electronic disinformation - with the sinister purpose of destroying the assets of enemy nations, through the reduction of trading partner confidence.
A third "black" initiative appears to be Project Stargate, where the CIA, DIA, and other military agencies revealed that since the 1970s, they have been using psychics, primarily for "remote viewing" of enemy installations and even testing some experiments in precognition, psychokinesis (attempting to scramble enemy missile codes), and ESP. The mainstream media played up the Stargate story for its laugh factor, but they simply bought the military's story that the program was discontinued due to a lack of results. In point of fact, the program was simply reshuffled bureaucratically, and while Stargate was ended, military use of psychics continue. If such human talents exist, nothing will be gained by using them in such restrictive, paranoid ways.
All three stories reveal the ongoing determination of the Pentagon to pursue dangerous projects which could backfire tremendously, outside the scope of public scrutiny. HAARP could have unguessable long-term consequences on planetary climate, or even knock out electronic systems and communications worldwide permanently. 'Cyberwar' techniques could very easily wind up in the hands of agencies determined to use them back against the U.S.; such is the nature of everything on the global net. And Stargate may have even involved some dangerous efforts to biochemically 'boost' psychic functioning, according to some reports. The emperor marches on...
Steve Mizrach, aka Seeker1