Arms Control in Space

Exploring Conditions for Preventive Arms Control

Kenneth A. Loparo, Max M. Mutschler

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137320636
• eBook ISBN: 9781137320643
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Relazioni internazionali

This book puts the widely-held view that 'arms control in space is not possible' to the test and aims to explore how, and under what conditions, arms control could become a reality. Drawing upon international regimes and IR theory, Mutschler examines the success of space weapons and anti-ballistic missiles.

1

Introduction

Approaching arms control in space

Space has always intrigued the minds of men. People had long desired to explore outer space, and when this became possible in the twentieth century; the results of space exploration were hailed as being among the major achievements of mankind. However, it was not mankind as such in search of new discoveries, but states that sent satellites and men into orbit. Consequently, from the start of the space age, the exploration of space was linked to national and international politics. Against the background of the Cold War, space became another area in which the rivalry of the superpowers was carried out. For both the Soviet Union and the United States, their space programs were a means of demonstrating the superiority of their respective social systems.

Likewise, activities in space were always linked with the development of military technology. It was during World War II that the German Wernher von Braun and his team of rocket engineers developed the A4/V-2, which was the first rocket that was able to reach space and it was also the first ballistic missile, used by Nazi Germany as a weapon of ‘vengeance’ (in German: Vergeltungswaffe; hence the ‘V’). After the war, von Braun was brought to the U.S. and became an important figure in the U.S. rocket program. He headed the team that developed the Redstone rocket, a nuclear-tipped ballistic missile, a modified version of which (the Jupiter-C) launched the first U.S. satellite into orbit in 1958. However, the Soviets, who could also draw upon the experience of German engineers, had been one step ahead when they sent Sputnik into orbit in 1957. Whereas Sputnik carried only a simple short-wave radio transmitter to send down signals to earth, the satellites of the next generation were used to take pictures for the purpose of military reconnaissance. Today, satellites are used for a broad variety of functions such as communication, Earth observation, or navigation. All these functions can be put to civilian and military use. There are over 1,000 satellites in orbit, more than 250 of which have a dedicated military purpose.¹ It is undisputed that space is militarized.

Some observers argue that sooner or later, space will not only be militarized but also weaponized, as was the case with the sea and air before. There is an important difference between the militarization and the weaponization of space. While military satellites strongly enhance the capability of weapons on earth – think for example of the global positioning system (GPS) and the ‘value’ it adds to precision-guided munitions – these satellites are not weapons as such; rather they act as force multipliers. Space weapons, in contrast, are devices (whether land-, sea-, air-, or space-based) designed to damage or destroy an object in orbit or any space-based device designed to attack targets on earth. During the Cold War, weapons to destroy satellites in orbit, so-called anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons, were developed and tested by both the Soviet Union and the United States. However, both superpowers refrained from full-scale development, let alone deployment, of these weapons; since they valued the secure access to space as an important prerequisite to increasing their military strength.

Following the end of the Cold War in 1991, and with its major rival in space gone, the U.S. started to reconsider the development of space weapons for its military enhancement. During the time of the George W. Bush administration in particular, from 2001, the idea of ‘space control’ – meaning among other things being able to deny space access to other countries – found its way into the space policy of the United States. For obvious reasons, this worried other space-faring countries, and particularly Russia and China. While Russia still possesses quite considerable know-how from the Soviet space program, it is China in particular that makes observers warn of a threatening arms race in space. China has an ambitious space program, having become, in 2003, the third country in history to send humans into space. In 2007, China followed the two major space powers of the Cold War in another category when it tested ASAT technology by shooting down an aging weather satellite of its own. In short, while there have been several tests of space weapons, the threshold to the procurement and deployment of such weapons has not been crossed; and space is not weaponized as are the sea and the air.

Several observers argue that we need international arms control agreements for space to remain unweaponized, and I agree with this position. Several attempts at arms control in space have been made and I will address them in detail later. For now, suffice to note that so far, none of them has been successful, a fact that provides support for the many opponents of arms control in space. These opponents are, for several reasons that I will address in Chapter 2, pessimistic about the prospects for arms control in space. One of the most common arguments is that the development of space weapons is too tempting and that the dual-use character of most space technology makes meaningful arms control impossible. They conclude that space, like the land, the sea, and the air will inevitably be weaponized. The consequence of this view is quite clear. If the weaponization of space is inevitable, the best strategy is to be among the forerunners, and develop space weapons sooner than the others. It seems that this perspective has won the day. While the development of space weapon technology goes on, arms control has no longer been prominent in the recent debates about space security. Instead, scholars and practitioners focus now on voluntary rules for behavior in space as an alternative to unhindered security competition in space. While international agreement on such rules would be much better that unhindered competition in space, it is unlikely that such rules alone will prevent an arms race in space. I will elaborate on this point in the next section.

Nevertheless, it is not the major purpose of this book to repeat the old arguments of why we need arms control in space. It aims, instead, to present the conditions under which an international regime of arms control in space can be established. It further asks whether these conditions are currently being met or what can and must be done in order to meet them. My argument is that the conclusion that arms control in space cannot be established is premature. This book attempts to show that arms control in space is not ‘pious nonsense’ as it was called by Collin Gray (1986: 134), but a viable strategy to avoid an arms race in space. Before I elaborate on the methodology, structure, and central findings of this book, I briefly show why such an arms race should be prevented and why arms control is the best means to achieve this.

Why do we need arms control in space?

Ultimately, the aims of arms control in space are the same ones as the classical goals of arms control as pointed out by Thomas Schelling and Morton Halperin (1961) in their landmark writing on the subject: (1) reducing the risk of war, (2) reducing the cost of preparing for war, and (3) reducing damage should war occur. I will consider them in turn with regard to their relevance for space.

Arms control can help to avoid war inasmuch as it can help states to achieve or retain a situation of strategic stability. This means that neither side achieves a decisive breakthrough in the development of weapons that strongly increases the capability to strike first and/or that decreases the risk of a return attack. Such a situation that clearly favors the offense increases the likelihood for the outbreak of war, because each side has the incentive to strike first in order to pre-empt the first strike of the other side. In the words of Schelling and Halperin (1961: 11): ‘The pre-emptive advantage makes the suspicion of war a cause of war.’² The deployment of weapons in space could create such a dangerous situation. Since satellites travel in predictable orbits around earth, they are highly vulnerable and it is difficult to protect them against attacks (Grego and Wright 2010: 14). This means once a state has the capability to put the space assets of another state at risk, it might be very attractive to use this as a threat in a time of political crisis. If the other side has space weapons too, such a threat to its space assets might trigger a dangerous chain reaction, since it would be confronted with the options to ‘use them or lose them’ (Stares 1985: 250). Even the loss of a satellite that was not caused by the use of ASATs could be interpreted as an attack (Grego and Wright 2010: 6).

In sum, ASATs can be considered destabilizing, in particular because they might be used for interfering with early warning and strategic communication satellites. Whether intended or not, this could be interpreted as the preparation for a first strike, thereby increasing the danger of a preventive strike (Stares 1985: 250; Weber 1991: 212–3). To make things worse, such a shooting war might not remain limited to space, if only because the terrestrial infrastructure for communication with space systems automatically becomes an attractive target, too. If one considers the potential for future political–military crises between Washington and Beijing over Taiwan, one would not wish to worsen such a crisis by an ASAT-armed China. This could produce a dangerous situation in which China could take out U.S. satellites, and a U.S. that consequently feels the need to pre-empt such a move by attacking Chinese space launch sites and other command and control facilities on the Chinese mainland. This, in turn, could be perceived by the Chinese as the precursor action to an all-out war (Tellis 2007: 64; Swaine 2007).

Arms control can also help to avoid high costs that are usually the result of an arms race. Since economic resources are limited, there is always a question of whether to allocate them to armament or some other fields. The reduction of this economic burden in order to invest the free resources in other activities is the oldest argument for disarmament and arms control (Bull 1961: 12–13). This argument holds for the case of space weapons, too. While some of the means to interfere with satellites are rather low-cost, a lot of resources are needed to develop and deploy advanced space weapons. To give only one example, according to David Wright and colleagues (Wright et al. 2005: 99), it would cost roughly US$40 billion to deploy a system of space-based interceptors for missile defense. This sum is only the launch cost and does not include the amount that has to be spent on the development and maintenance of such a system.

Finally, arms control can help to reduce the damage if war should occur. A full-scale space war would severely damage the usability of outer space. Because it would be accompanied by the increasing testing of space weapons, an arms race in space endangers the sustainable use of space. Each destruction of an object in space results in a huge amount of debris that remains in orbit for a long time. The vacuum of space means that objects in space, once propelled, do not lose their speed unless they are low enough to be slowed down by atmospheric drag and finally fall back to earth. This means that pieces of space debris, depending on their altitude, can stay in orbit for decades or even centuries. There is already a considerable amount of such debris in space resulting from decades of space flight, mainly consisting of parts of old spacecraft, non-functioning satellites, and the debris from intended or unintended explosions in space (Neuneck and Rothkirch 2005: 375). Currently, there are more than 21.000 pieces of space debris that can be tracked by the U.S. Space Surveillance Network (SSN) (Grego and Wright 2010: 4). These pieces, even the smaller ones, endanger other objects in space. Should the testing of debris-creating space weapons increase there is a real danger of a chain reaction that has serious consequences for the use of space.

While there are several good arguments for arms control in space, none of the attempts to agree on this matter has, so far, been successful. Quite understandably, this lack of consensus has led to a search for alternatives. Proposals have been made that do not attempt to ban certain weapon technologies – as it is the case with international arms control – but which instead seek to set standards of appropriate behavior in space, so-called ‘rules of the road’. Such rules could take the form of a Code of Conduct, which would only be binding in a political manner, and not legally (as would be the case with an international arms- control treaty). The obligations of such a Code of Conduct could include, for example, avoiding simulated attacks in space, creating special caution and safety areas around satellites, and – of central importance – a ban on so-called ‘harmful interference with satellites’. Such an approach has some advantages when compared to arms control. Agreeing upon a soft law approach is much easier than agreeing upon an arms control treaty. First, the consequences of violating a voluntary Code of Conduct are less severe than if it was an international treaty. Second, a ‘rules of the road’ approach avoids lengthy debates about definitions of the technologies that are to fall under the proscriptions. It was probably for these reasons that the European Union (EU) adopted this approach and, in December 2008, approved a Draft Code of Conduct for Outer Space Activities.

However, the major arguments in favor of a ‘rules of the road’ approach – its soft law character and its avoidance of banning space weapons – are, at the same time, the major shortcomings of this approach. First, it is precisely because the costs of violating an international treaty can be considered higher than in the case of a Code of Conduct that states are more likely willing to abide by the treaty. In other words, the damage that cheating does to your reputation is something you seriously need to consider before breaking the rules.³ Therefore, the agreement to a treaty signals a stronger commitment to the respective rules. This, in turn, could build much needed trust between the parties. In addition, as Müller (1993b) has shown, security regimes that are comprised of norms and rules which are embedded into international treaties do not easily fall victim to recalculations of national interests. The rules embedded in international treaties play a central role. Treaty obligations are converted into domestic legislation. This means that the breakout from a treaty is not only a matter of the executive’s position, but also of an internal debate, and thus faces a much higher hurdle. Within these debates, the norms and rules of the treaties provide a focus for the supporters of arms control, and play an important role as systems of reference for the debate (Müller 1993b: 383). Second, an agreement that bans certain behavior – in this case the harmful interference with satellites – but does not restrict the means to do so – space weapons – can hardly be considered comprehensive. Under the Code of Conduct proposed by the EU, the development of space weapons could continue. The code prohibits the destruction of satellites but not the development of space weapons. This means that in times of crisis – when one might find it justified not to stick to any ‘rules of the road’ – these weapons could be readily available.

All this is not to say that a ‘rules of the road’ approach as taken by the EU Code of Conduct does not have its merits. Its pragmatic nature makes it a suitable starting point for the discussions among states and if it would find the support of the other space-faring countries, this would be an important step to increase space security. However, the conclusion of the arguments presented here is that formal arms control that bans the development of space weapons is better suited to keep space safe in the long run. It is for this very reason that I made it the central aim of this book to find out what must happen to establish arms control in space.

On international regimes and nonregimes

As this book seeks to explore the conditions under which an international regime of arms control in space can emerge, it is necessary to elaborate on the central concept of international regimes first. A conference, convened in order to prepare a special issue of the journal International Organization on international regimes in 1982, arrived at the following consensus definition of international regimes: Regimes are ‘sets of implicit or explicit principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actors’ expectations converge in a given area of international relations’ (Krasner 1983: 186). Krasner (1983: 186) elaborates on the various parts of that definition:

Principles are beliefs of fact, causation, and rectitude. Norms are standards of behaviour defined in terms of rights and obligations. Rules are specific prescriptions or proscriptions for action. Decision-making procedures are prevailing practices for making and implementing collective choice.

The nuclear non-proliferation regime serves as an excellent illustration: The belief that the proliferation of nuclear weapons increases the likelihood of war is one of the central principles upon which the international non-proliferation regime rests. Two of the central norms of this regime are linked to this principle, namely the obligations that non- nuclear states shall not seek to acquire nuclear weapons, and that nuclear states should not assist non-nuclear states in any efforts to do so. These norms are converted into more specific rules, such as the proscription for any nuclear weapons state to transfer nuclear weapons to any recipient. In addition to these principles, norms and rules, the international non-proliferation regime consists of several decision-making procedures, such as the procedures for the establishment of safeguard agreements between non-nuclear weapon states party to the treaty and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

International regimes are international institutions. This becomes obvious if one takes a look at Keohanes’ definition of institutions. They are conceived as ‘persistent and connected sets of rules (formal and informal) that prescribe behavioural roles, constrain activity, and shape expectations’ (Keohane 1989: 3). International regimes do not have the capacity to act. This distinguishes them from international organizations, which are institutions as well. Returning to the above-mentioned example, the IAEA as an international organization can act, the non-proliferation regime, as such, cannot. Another important difference is that international regimes are, by definition, issue area specific institutions, whereas the actions of an international organization need not be restricted to a particular issue area. A case in point would be the United Nations (UN) (Hasenclever et al. 2002: 10–11).

Applying this concept to space weapons, there is – despite a considerable demand – no international arms control regime in place. Dimitrov and colleagues (2007...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Arms Control: Concepts and Debates
• 3 Regime Theory and Preventive Arms Control
• 4 Anti-Ballistic Missiles and Arms Control
• 5 Space Weapons and Arms Control
• 6 Analyzing Arms Control in Space
• 7 Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index