Militarisation of Space / Planetary Weapons

[Phobos]

I have always had concerns about weapons in space. Ground based weapons take longer to reach their targets, and that delay makes it less likely for false alarms to start a nuclear exchange.

However it has now become obvious to me that space based nuclear weapons are by no means the only form of space weapon we should be concerned about.

For the purposes of discussion I wish to put forward a few potential developments which may, or may not be put into place;

Weather control;
The former soviet union achieved some success with cloud seeding, so where are we with weather control these days ? There are hints that we may soon be able to control (or at least affect) many aspects of the weather and by doing we may be able to use the weather as a weapon.

Deflecting asteriods;
There has been a lot of publicity regarding the potential threat of a Tungusta style impact on our planet. With this publicity is the implicit suggestion that we develop a technology to counter such a threat. Whilst this could be considered a defensive technology we should not ignore the potential for it to be use offensively.

Bunker busting technology;
Not currently related to planetary science, but what happens when we use directed nuclear blasts (or simply drop large masses from space orbit) ? What I am concerned about here is the possiblility of using an extreme form of this technology to break through the Earths crust and by doing create an artificial volcanic eruption. To my knowledge there are few places where this could be achieved, but what if I am wrong ?

At the moment these are the main possible developments which are astronomy/planetary science related. Anyone else any thoughts on the subject either on the points raised or other astromomy related weapons issues ?

Phobos

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Phobos on 2002-07-04 06:03 ]</font>

[Espritch]

As far as weather control, I'd say that is currently more science fiction than science. Weather systems are extreamly complex and changes to such complex systems can have profound and totally unexpected results (I refer you to chaos theory and the butterfly effect). We can hardly predict the weather to any degree of accuracy beyond a few days. Controlling it is still way beyond our current level of understanding.

As far as starting a volcano by droping a meteor on the crust, I would guess that that is also highly unlikely. Solid earth is very good at asorbing impacts. We have been hit by some very big objects in the past. As far as I know, none of these have produced volcanism.

[Paul Unwin]

On 2002-07-04 06:01, Phobos wrote:
Deflecting asteroids;
There has been a lot of publicity regarding the potential threat of a Tungusta style impact on our planet. With this publicity is the implicit suggestion that we develop a technology to counter such a threat. Whilst this could be considered a defensive technology we should not ignore the potential for it to be use offensively.

The same goes for asteroid mining. If we have the technology to move asteroids, comets, or just chunks of them into or near the Earth-Moon system, then we have the technology to plunk these objects onto any point on the planet.

Now, a government might not see this as cost effective weapon (although it would be unstoppable) but a rogue corporation or well-funded paramilitary might just be able to pull it off someday.

It would be unfortunate if we never let ourselves use the wealth available to us, because we couldn't trust ourselves with it.

[David Hall]

What would it take to be able to use an asteroid as a weapon? You'd need to be able to go out, get an asteroid, maneuver it precisely, and launch it towards the Earth. You'd also have to be able to do it either without being noticed, or without being stoppable. Otherwise your enemy (us) would be able to just send out it's own missles and destroy your craft before you could finish the job.

Asteroids are big, heavy, and mostly very far away. I think it'd be very difficult to do anything with them using purely robotic vehicles. It takes a lot more finesse to precisely control something like that than it would to just deflect it. And I don't think it could be done without someone noticing.

Which leads to another factor. If it's discovered that an asteroid is on a collision course, and we know who put it on that course, then what's to stop us from retaliating in a more normal fashion? We could do that even before we were hit. And we'd probably have time to evacuate people from the target area as well.

Maybe it would be possible someday, when interplanetary travel is more commonplace, but I don't see it as being very feasable for the forseeable future.

[Phobos]

If asteroids were deflected onto an Earthbound course, then the asteroids used would probably be one of the near Earth asteroids currently being mapped.

The techniques which are being planned to deflect asteroids away from Earth could just as well be used to deflect them towards Earth, but you are right about the need for precise control.

With regards weather modification, you may find the following interesting reading (http://www.au.af.mil/au/database/research/ay1996/acsc/96-025ag.htm)

The concept of dropping a large mass from orbit does not fully equate to an asteriod impact because in this example we would be talking about an impact "engineered" to perform maximum damage. Therefore I would expect such a mass to have some form of heat shielding, be shaped to suit, have some steering capability, and possibly be designed for maximum depth penetration (along the lines of armour piercing shells). That said I too doubt that designs exist with the capacity to "tunnel" through to create an artificial volcanoe, but if they could I would expect them to be very effective (a soft target would be somewhere like yellowstone park).

Phobos

[Argos]

I humbly think that no power in this world could develop great magnitude projects like these without being noticed. Such move could lead to a higher level of arms race. If a power is discovered building a project like those ones, the opponent will immediately counterbalance the threat by a) preventively attacking the hostile power; b) building its own project.

I don’t think that a war between powers sharing the same planet will ever be fought with such weapons. Frequently, one objective in war is to take possession of the enemy’s structure. In case of a successful attack by an asteroid, what would be left of the opponent? What would be left to conquer? Even if the objective was simply to destroy completely the enemy, what would be the level of risk to the offender? Certainly it is high. It is simply too complicated. There will always be cheaper and easier ways to destroy an enemy living in the same planet as yours. And to throw an asteroid over the head of an enemy, it would have to be an enormous amount of hate involved. I don’t think that even the human race could hate so much.

But I think that the employment of “astronomical weapons” could be justified, in terms of cost and complexity, when the conflict involved two civilizations in distinct planets, in distinct stars systems. Here the objective would be to completely destroy, or to inflict the maximum level of damage to the enemy. Nevertheless, there is a problem here too: if you are able to move asteroids and control weather, things that could entitle you to defy an enemy elsewhere among the stars, it means that you have acquired a great domain over science and technology. You probably had to cooperate in planetary scale, along vast periods of time, with members of your own species. If you did this, it means that you have also advanced so much in ethics. Your reptilian brain, the center of aggression, must have been tamed for generations now. Now your’re a grownup. A contemplative scientist-philosopher. So, why the hell are you willing to attack another species? You could say that it would be important to have such weapons as defensive tools. But a civilization as developed as yours, able to attack you, will also be as developed in ethics as you are, so that nobody will want to attack you.

War is something about territory. Had the planet earth 40 % more land, the risk of war between any two given enemies would decrease by 70% (sheer guess). And there is plenty of territory among the stars.

I have a firm belief that war is for the lower forms of life. Carl Sagan has convinced me of that. Large scale scientific advance will necessarily lead to large scale ethical development. Or to the destruction an entire civilization, long before it poses a threat to other species.

[Kaptain K]

Argos,
I think that you are under-estimating our current and near future technology and over-estimating the difficulty of using meteoroid-asteroid bombardment as a weapon.
1) To "take out" a single city (say Bagdad just for example) doesn't require a "planet killer". A couple hundred tons would do.
2) a chunk of nickel-iron that size would only be 5 meters or so across.
3) An ion drive like DS-1 could, with sufficient fuel, provide the necessary delta vee to divert such a rock into a collision course.
4) A probe with such a motor could be lauched (with full fan-fare) as an "asteroid exploration mission" and the be "convientiently lost" due to "malfuntion". If further communication with the probe was done with laser communications, nobody would be the wiser. Laser communication would also give the precision position and velocity vectors necessary to hit a specific target (given the latitude of the target, time of impact gives longitude).
5) Plausible deniability. Such an event would appear to be an "act of God" or "nature".
6) No radioactive fallout.
_________________
When all is said and done - sit down and shut up!

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Kaptain K on 2002-07-05 12:29 ]</font>

[roidspop]

As far as I know, none of these have produced volcanism

A possible exception may be the Deccan Traps which, I have been led to understand, erupted about the same time as the KT event and were antipodal. Seems speculative, but not out of line.

A possible psyche weapon: particle beams used to produce coherent displays (images and text) in the upper atmosphere over a target at night.

A beam of charged particles might be directed into the upper atmosphere and, like a TV's electron beam, would sweep back and forth while being modulated to produce an image. The chief complication is the local effect of the geomagnetic field; it would be very difficult to get the beam to go precisely where you wanted it. So, a neutral atom beam would be necessary; accelerate protons, neutralize with electrons, and maybe they could do the job. Perhaps a high-energy UV laser could work.

What could you do with it? Well, a simple message like, "I am watching you!" might have interesting effects. Or maybe a giant digital clock, counting down... Or "(insert name of tyrant) MUST GO!"

[Argos]

On 2002-07-05 12:26, Kaptain K wrote:
Argos,
I think that you are under-estimating our current and near future technology and over-estimating the difficulty of using meteoroid-asteroid bombardment as a weapon.
1) To "take out" a single city (say Bagdad just for example) doesn't require a "planet killer". A couple hundred tons would do.


What about a good old carpet-bombing? /phpBB/images/smiles/icon_smile.gif

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Argos on 2002-07-05 13:12 ]</font>

[Donnie B.]

Well, if the target was Baghdad, it would have to be flying-carpet bombing... right? /phpBB/images/smiles/icon_razz.gif

[Espritch]

A possible exception may be the Deccan Traps which, I have been led to understand, erupted about the same time as the KT event and were antipodal. Seems speculative, but not out of line.

From what I've read, the Deccan Traps were the product of techtonic drift positioning a magma hotspot directly below a fault line allowing rapid egress of magma along the lenght of the fault. The event lasted thousands of years and is probably only coinciendentally within a similar time frame to the Yucatan impact.

[roidspop]

The eruption of that hotspot apparently preceeded the event in the Yucatan by perhaps 100,000 years, but its output was dwarfed by what followed the impact. As you say, there is an east-west rift zone just there, and it is very tempting to imagine that the shock wave from the impact was sufficient to "open up" the zone to allow really massive flooding to take place. Coincidentally, Reunion is sitting just about where a massive impact might trigger flood basalts in Yellowstone.

1) To "take out" a single city (say Bagdad just for example) doesn't require a "planet killer". A couple hundred tons would do.
. In Arthur C. Clarke's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", we have the revolutionary citizens of the moon bombarding the earth with rock launched from mass drivers. They won, too.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: roidspop on 2002-07-06 21:33 ]</font>

[David Hall]

I was wondering when someone would bring up Harsh Mistress. I'd been thinking along the same lines.

However, there are some differences between what we're discussing and that book. The Masses thrown at the Earth in the book originated on the Moon, not asteroids out in space. They were shaped by man, coated in steel, and thrown at the Earth using a mass driver. Since the driver had been built specifically for the purpose of throwing cargo containers towards the Earth, it was simply a matter of making a few simple adjustments. No need to sneak out and manhandle a big space rock.

Also, the Moon is pretty close, so there was little time to react to what was thrown at them and course corrections could be easily made en-route with little warning. And they didn't lob just one rock, they sent out dozens, so even if the Earth could stop one or two, it became almost impossible to stop them all.

IIRC, when the lunar colonies started throwing rocks at the Earth, they didn't send them directly down. They sent the rocks into Earth orbit and then made their demands. It's only after the Earth government refused that they altered the trajectories to impact targets on the ground. One of the things that caused the Earth's defeat was that they didn't take the threat seriously. They discovered too late just how devistating a large impact could be.

So it was the special circumstances of the story that made them effective weapons in the book. But in any case, Heinlein was the first(?) to show how rocks from space could be used as weapons. If asteroids could be used as weapons, quite nasty ones they could be, that's for sure.

_________________
<font size="-1">PLEASE NOTE: Some quantum physics theories suggest that when the consumer is not directly observing this product, it may cease to exist or will exist only in a vague and undetermined state.</font>

<font size="-1">(Added a small point)</font>

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: David Hall on 2002-07-07 05:30 ]</font>

[roidspop]

They sent the rocks into Earth orbit and then made their demands

The rocks were launched on orbits terminating on the surface of the earth...to have put them into orbit around the earth and then to brake them for the final drop to the target would have require a lot of delta v, which would just be wasted mass. Heinlein (Dang..I said Clarke wrote that book!) put rocket motors on the rocks powerful enough to divert them to unpopulated areas IF given enough lead time.

There are lots of small asteroids, many of them earth-crossers which may be easier to reach than the moon. So this scenario could be played out using asteroidal material; it would just involve greater time spans. This would also make it easier to divert the payloads and miss the earth entirely. The delta V from asteroid to earth would depend on the asteroid's orbit, but I would imagine you could pick one that would let you drop rocks on terrestrial targets for less energy than it would take to do the same thing from the moon.

The Chinese have announced that they're going to the moon by the end of this decade, haven't they? Leadeth one to think.

[Nixix]

China has nukes. Bin Laden does not. Iraq does not. China is heading to the moon. Think we might be moving in to a position to look for WMD?

[Archer17]

China has nukes. Bin Laden does not. Iraq does not. China is heading to the moon. Think we might be moving in to a position to look for WMD?It looks like you did some serious digging to dredge this thread up .. If you came here to engage in US-bashing or politics, take a hike.

[Phobos]

Rcently president Bush made an anouncement that on the face of it sounded very promising - namely, the building of spacecraft on the moon for launching a manned mission to Mars.

However, I have some serious concerns regarding the military implications. Bush has already hinted he is ready to use nuclear propulsion in the spacecraft that are to be launched in the near future. No problem there provided this policy is not abused to put nukes in space via the back door.

As part of his speech he also mention NASA and the pentagon sharing more technology, there was no real explanation as to what he meant by this statement, but it is one more reason to be concerned that there is a hidden militarisation of space agenda here.

Phobos

[Glom]

There is a little thing called The Outer Space Treaty that forbids the placement of nuclear weapons in space. Now, I know there is lot of talk about Bush not caring at all for international treaties except when it suits him, but breaking the The Outer Space Treaty would be stupid as it would clear the way for the bad guys to do the same thing.

[Phobos]

The only rule that seems to apply is this one;

States shall not place nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on celestial bodies or station them in outer space in any other manner;


Key point here being "In Orbit", but it seems to me there are at least three workarounds.

1. The treaty was between the UK, USA and the Soviet Union - there is no soviet union now so there may be a legal way out there.

2. It regers to weapons being sent in orbit, but in orbit around where ?, Bush's proposal may place the weapons in something other than Earth orbit,.

3. Bush could avoid the entire issue of sending things into orbit from Earth by building them on the moon using Lunar material. That way they were never left Earth as nuclear weapons.

True all three may be described as atempts to work around the rules, but that is exactly the sort of behaviour that we see from world governments - eg. How whaling rules are flouted using slaughter for scientific purposes as the workaround.

PHobos

[Glom]

1. It was ratified by a smegload of nations actually.

2. Where's he going to smegging put them? In Martian orbit? They'll be useful in defcon 2 situation!

3. Oh please! Do you have any evidence that Bush is even thinking of trying it on with the Outer Space Treaty? I know many think he's a bit of a war mongerer, but this all sounds like paranoid delusion.

[Amadeus]

The only rule that seems to apply is this one;

States shall not place nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on celestial bodies or station them in outer space in any other manner;


Key point here being "In Orbit", but it seems to me there are at least three workarounds.

1. The treaty was between the UK, USA and the Soviet Union - there is no soviet union now so there may be a legal way out there.

2. It regers to weapons being sent in orbit, but in orbit around where ?, Bush's proposal may place the weapons in something other than Earth orbit,.

3. Bush could avoid the entire issue of sending things into orbit from Earth by building them on the moon using Lunar material. That way they were never left Earth as nuclear weapons.

True all three may be described as atempts to work around the rules, but that is exactly the sort of behaviour that we see from world governments - eg. How whaling rules are flouted using slaughter for scientific purposes as the workaround.

PHobos

It's more plausable if he wanted to put nukes in space to just break the treaty outright rather than go through a complecated proccess to give your selfs a weak argument. I would ask why he would want to do this though seeing as americans have stealth tech and are able to reach any point on the earth in hours.

A more likely development would be stealth missiles. They could take off to a high altitude then when they get to the enemies radar coverage switch off the motor to glide in without any heat signature.

[TheGalaxyTrio]

Weather control

http://www.au.af.mil/au/database/research/ay1996/acsc/96-025ag.htm

[SeanF]

The only rule that seems to apply is this one;

States shall not place nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on celestial bodies or station them in outer space in any other manner;


Key point here being "In Orbit", but it seems to me there are at least three workarounds.

. . .

2. It regers to weapons being sent in orbit, but in orbit around where ?, Bush's proposal may place the weapons in something other than Earth orbit,.


[-X

". . . or station them in outer space in any other manner"

[Archer17]

Phobos: I agree with Amadeus in that there's no need to deploy nukes in space. The U.S. can reach out and touch someone without having to rain down nukes from orbit. The Space Treaty is serious stuff and I see no reason why this country would violate it for the reason I just mentioned. Besides, it would only result in other countries doing the same. Now a laser platform type thing is a different story and might be used in an ASAT role. This is just conjecture on my part. From what I hear the US military is going to use lasers for missile defense but these will be deployed on converted airliners, not based in orbit.

[eburacum45]

Asteroid warfare would magnify the amount of destruction from a particular amount of energy expended, as you gain the potential energy of the sky rock; all you need to do is find all the small rocks near the Earth(the NEO program is doing that quite efficiently)
set off a nuclear charge two or three diameters away from the object on the other side of its orbit, and wait a year or two;

if you have done your sums right you will have a good chance of hitting the Earth somewhere..

mind you I can't see these objects being very accurate city killers, as it takes much more energy to steer or deflect them when they get closer.

The mass driver attack from the Moon is much more accurate- you should manage to hit the right country, anyway.

Almost every high energy space technology has the potential for use in extreme warfare; fission drives, fusion drives, asteroid mining, maser powerbeams from solar power satellites;

even ion drives could be used in kinetic warfare.

if the nations of the Earth get together and decide to ban all dangerous technology from space by treaty, the colonisation of the solar system will never occur on any reasonable timescale.

[Archer17]

..if the nations of the Earth get together and decide to ban all dangerous technology from space by treaty, the colonisation of the solar system will never occur on any reasonable timescale.I think that a total ban on all things considered "dangerous technology" would never work anyway. For instance, sooner or later we'll need to think about what can be done to address any Earthbound NEOs and it'll no doubt involve "dangerous" technology.