US military's robotic shuttle spooks Iran
By Victor Kotsev
As the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle, the United States Air Force's new robotic
mini-shuttle, made its maiden flight into space last Thursday, many of the
details surrounding the spacecraft remained veiled in secrecy.
It is known that the X-37B project is based on a National Aeronautics and Space
Administration (NASA) model which was earlier scrapped, probably reducing
costs, and that the project is entirely funded by the Department of Defense's
black box.
However, its total budget is unclear, as is its exact mission - "classified
experiments" - the location of its mission control and the duration of its
journey, which could be anything up to nine months. "In all honesty, we don't
know when it's coming back for
sure," said Gary Payton, deputy under-secretary for the air force's space
programs.
Given all the mystery, it is no surprise that the launch generated a lot of
hype. Some observers, including apparently the Iranian government, interpreted
it as a threat against Iran. The Islamic Republic specifically expressed worry
about the "militarization of space", and Press TV, a government-owned Iranian
media outlet, called the project a "secret space warplane".
United States government officials promptly denied the claims. "The X-37B is a
risk reduction vehicle for space experimentation and to explore concepts of
operation for a long duration, reusable space vehicle," said a spokesperson for
the project.
The robotic shuttle, if it passes its tests successfully, would add important
new capabilities for the US Air Force. At the very least, it would help service
expensive US military satellites; it is not hard, however, to imagine much more
active military roles. "Regardless of its original intent, the most obvious and
formidable is in service as a space fighter - a remotely piloted craft capable
of disabling multiple satellites in orbit on a single mission and staying on
orbit for months to engage newly orbited platforms," said Everett Dolman,
professor at the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies at the Maxwell-Gunter
Air Force Base.
Some go even further in their speculation. "Ultimately, weapons could be
delivered from a space plane in low Earth orbit," commented William Scott, a
former bureau chief for the Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine.
Perched on top of a giant Atlas V rocket ready to take it into space, the X-37B
looks diminutive and unimpressive. Its length is just 8.8 meters and its height
is less than three meters. The wingspan is 4.25 meters, bringing the total
weight to about five tons. However, this small size, in addition to the ability
to adjust orbit, makes it an ideal reconnaissance and anti-satellite platform.
It is especially well-adapted to enter and leave polar-type orbit, favored by
most espionage satellites, without being detected. "A shuttle [is] able to lift
off from Vandenberg [US Air Force base in California]," writes Lewis Page for
The Register, "orbit at a high angle from the Equator once - during which time
it could deploy something or pick something up - and then re-enter, using its
wings to bend its re-entry track east and so put down again in California,
never having overflown any nation of concern".
This information might help explain Iran's worries about the project. The
Islamic Republic's space program is already fairly advanced, and the country
has two satellites in orbit: Sinah-1, launched by Russia in 2005, and Omid,
launched by a domestically-built rocket last year. Several other satellites and
space missions are in the works.
Since the X-37B is still in the early stages of being tested, it is unlikely
that it poses any real danger to Iranian (or any other) satellites. Due to its
small payload, speculations that it might be used for orbital bombardment also
appear unrealistic. Ultimately, however, there is an intimate connection to the
Iranian nuclear program that provides context to the Iranian fears. It rests in
the changing role of nuclear weapons for military strategy with the advance of
science and technological capacity.
This is by no means a new development, but it was temporarily put on hold when
the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact collapsed, in 1991. The doctrine of
Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), developed in the 1950s and reflecting the
early realities of nuclear weapons, was already beginning to show cracks in the
1960s. The development of anti-ballistic missile systems threatened
second-strike capabilities, and nuclear weapons placed in low orbit could evade
early warning radars and thus enable a successful first strike. Both of these
developments threatened the balance of terror, and at that point both the US
and the Soviet Union acted together to preserve the status quo. The Outer Space
Treaty of 1967 and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972 banned nuclear
weapons from space and restricted the development of anti-ballistic missile
systems.
The fundamental problem of deterrence - that nuclear weapons can only serve
their purpose if they are never used but if they can always be counted on as a
threat - surfaced again in the 1980s, and fueled Ronald Reagan's famous
Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), often derisively dubbed "Star Wars". The
technical infeasibility of the SDI at the time, added to the collapse of the
Eastern bloc at the end of the decade, and shelved the debate for a while.
However, as nuclear non-proliferation once again emerged as a pressing issue,
so did the discussion of the role of nuclear weapons in military planning. "The
21st century twist that invalidates the old policy is that the greater risk is
not state versus state WMD [weapons of mass destruction] use, it's that as more
countries like Pakistan and Iran and North Korea get the bomb, the odds that
one or more warheads fall into the hands of less rational non-state actors
grows," David Rothkopf wrote for Foreign Policy.
In this line of thought, it is not a coincidence that US President Barack
Obama's recent Nuclear Posture Review came out right in the middle of the Iran
crisis - nor that it specifically allows for a possible first-use of nuclear
weapons against states such as Iran and North Korea [1]. While it is unclear
how the Iranian crisis will unfold, it appears that a new policy of
containment, specifically designed to counter "rogue" cases, is in the making.
"The United States does not intend for missile defense to affect the strategic
balance with Russia or China," Deputy Under Secretary of Defense James Miller
said before the Senate Armed Services Committee on April 20. According to
Russian Internet website Gazeta.ru (and other Russian media), moreover, the US
administration might be interested in developing a joint missile-defense
program with Russia, aimed specifically to counter the threat from North Korea
and Iran.
Such a development would cast the debate on nuclear containment in an entirely
new light. An all-out war between established powers such as the US and Russia
is all but unthinkable now, since the sheer number of nuclear missiles and the
advanced technology available to both militaries would preclude successful
defense. Mutual destruction among the main nuclear players will continue to be
assured for the foreseeable future, so there is little use spending extravagant
amounts of money for individual protection.
However, a joint missile defense designed to contain Third-World nuclear
newcomers, who as a rule are less technologically advanced and possess a more
limited capacity to build rockets, might be much more realistic. If the global
powers can strike a deal among each other, they could effectively establish an
exclusive superpower club.
A main attraction of nukes for rogue regimes is that they are a relatively
affordable option to achieve deterrence. Nowadays, obtaining nuclear weapons
has become much cheaper and easier than it ever was during the Cold War.
Conventional logic, moreover, has it that once a country has achieved a nuclear
status, it will be left alone; North Korea, for example, has so far got away
with much more than is reasonable, even though its economy and industry are in
shambles [2].
Economic calculations, therefore, continue to play a major role in
proliferation: if a relatively poor country such as North Korea or Iran gets
the bomb, it will boost its regional power status without having to keep up
with massive military investments. This is precisely the assumption that a new
containment policy would target. Should a missile defense would erode a
(presumed) soon-to-come Iranian nuclear deterrent, the quality and quantity of
weaponry would once again take center stage in defense planning and the Iranian
regime would eventually be unable to keep up with the costs of maintaining its
newly acquired regional superpower status. An updated version of Reaganomics
would make proliferation unsavory.
Enter the X-37B: the latest development in a long series of military projects.
The launch is yet another demonstration to the Iranians that soon their
headlong quest for nuclear technology might lose a lot of its value, at least
as far as possible military applications are concerned. With a number of
fabulously expensive science-fiction type weapons currently being developed
[3], and given the amount of money being spent on covert operations in space
[4], it seems that any military race will soon be a foregone conclusion for a
poor newcomer.
Moreover, we could speculate, a robotic mini shuttle-cum anti-satellite
platform could one day soon occupy an important place in an anti-nuclear
missile defense. It would help counter the possibility that a space-capable
country such as Iran would put nuclear weapons in space to game missile
defenses. Such a development may seem far-fetched, but if the Soviet Union
could do it in the 1960s, smaller players might be able to do it over half a
century later, too.
In a recent interview with the New York Times, Obama himself suggested that
there is a "move towards less emphasis on nuclear weapons" and a greater focus
on "conventional weapons capability [as] an effective deterrent in all but the
most extreme circumstances." It is important to also watch closely the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) review conference, which began on Monday.
Preliminary reports of increasing pressure even on semi-accepted nuclear powers
such as India, Pakistan, and (reputedly) Israel to disarm suggest that the
superpowers are seriously determined to limit new nuclear arrivals.
Sophisticated new technology such as the robotic shuttle demonstrates a very
promising potential path to do so.
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