Space Assurance or Space Dominance?; The Case Against Weaponizing Space

viii, 131, [3] pages. Abbreviations. Footnotes. Selected Bibliography. Cover has slight wear and soiling. Michael Krepon co-founded the Stimson Center in 1989. He served as Stimson's President and CEO until 2000, and continues to direct Stimson's programming on nuclear and space issues. He was the University of Virginia's Diplomat Scholar, where he taught from 2001-2010. He is the author and editor of twenty-one books. He worked at the Carnegie Endowment, the State Department's Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and on Capitol Hill. He received the Carnegie Endowment's Thérèse Delpech Memorial Award in 2015 for lifetime achievement in non-governmental work to reduce nuclear dangers. Christopher Oren Clary's research focuses on the sources of cooperation in interstate rivalries. he also studies the causes and consequences of nuclear proliferation, U.S. defense policy, and the politics of South Asia. Previously, He served as country director for South Asian affairs in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (2006-2009), a research associate at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. (2003-2005), and a research assistant at the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington, D.C. (2001-2003). I received a Ph.D. in Political Science from MIT. While space has long been utilized to assist military operations, it has not been weaponized. A new report by the Stimson Center--Space Assurance or Space Dominance? The Case Against Weaponizing Space--argues that the surest way for the United States to lose the military advantages now enjoyed in space is to turn the heavens into a shooting gallery. The Stimson report concludes that US military and economic security is best served by avoiding the flight-testing and deployment of space weaponry. The pursuit of space dominance could impair global commerce, produce long-lasting, environmental debris in space, and harm alliance ties as well as relations between the United States and Russia and China, the two countries whose help is most needed to stop and reverse proliferation. The quest to dominate space could prompt low-cost, low-tech countermeasures in the form of space mines and other anti-satellite devices. Potential adversaries in space would be faced with the dilemma of shooting first or risk being shot. The quest to secure dominion over space would therefore elevate into the heavens the hair-trigger postures that plagued US and Soviet officials during the Cold War.…