The Past That Bombed…And A Race To The Future

By Righty

The summer of 1945…

The first A-Bomb.  These were tests done in Nevada…in secret.  Well over 900 of these tests were completed.  Scary stuff back then.

Operation Upshot-Knothole, conducted at the Nevada Proving Ground between March 17 and June 4, 1953, consisted of 11 atmospheric tests: three airdrops, seven tower tests and one airburst. Upshot-Knothole involved the testing of new theories, using both fission and fusion devices.

House No. 1, located 3,500 feet from ground zero, was completely destroyed on the first day of testing. The elapsed time from the first picture to the last was 2⅔ seconds. The camera was completely enclosed in a 2-inch lead sheath as a protection against radiation. The only source of light was that from the detonation. Frame No. 1 (upper left) shows the house lighted by the blast. Frame No. 2 (upper right) shows the house on fire.

Courtesy National Nuclear Security Administration/Nevada Site Office

Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan…A-Bombs… World War II…The face of war changed.

View the complete slide show here

Bombs and weapons have, of course, changed much since 63 years ago.  What was more about destroying massive areas then is now about concentration, while at the same time protecting our soldiers.  This includes using drones and robobugs to scope out areas before soldiers go into combat.

But what about the future?  We’ve already been looking ahead.  The plan is for 2025….it used to be called Star Wars…now it’s Space Wars.  Where the United States was once dominant, we are now not so far ahead.  We have Russia and China on our tail.

In war, do not launch an ascending attack head-on against the enemy who holds the high ground. Do not engage the enemy when he makes a descending attack from high ground. Lure him to level ground to do battle.
—Sun Tzu, Chinese military strategist, The Art of War, circa 500 B.C.

That consensus is now in danger of unraveling. In October 2006 the Bush administration adopted a new, rather vaguely worded National Space Policy that asserts the right of the U.S. to conduct “space control” and rejects “new legal regimes or other restrictions that seek to prohibit or limit U.S. access to or use of space.” Three months later the People’s Republic of China shocked the world by shooting down one of its own aging Fengyun weather satellites, an act that resulted in a hailstorm of dangerous orbital debris and a deluge of international protests, not to mention a good deal of hand-wringing in American military and political circles. The launch was the first test of a dedicated antisatellite weapon in more than two decades—making China only the third country, after the U.S. and the Russian Federation, to have demonstrated such a technology. Many observers wondered whether the test might be the first shot in an emerging era of space warfare.

Critics maintain it is not at all clear that a nation’s security would be enhanced by developing the means to wage space war. After all, satellites and even orbiting weapons, by their very nature, are relatively easy to spot and easy to track, and they are likely to remain highly vulnerable to attack no matter what defense measures are taken. Further, developing antisatellite systems would almost surely lead to a hugely expensive and potentially runaway arms race, as other countries would conclude that they, too, must compete. And even tests of the technology needed to conduct space battles—not to mention a real battle—could generate enormous amounts of wreckage that would continue to orbit Earth. Converging on satellites and crewed space vehicles at speeds approaching several miles a second, such space debris would threaten satellite-based telecommunications, weather forecasting, precision navigation, even military command and control, potentially sending the world’s economy back to the 1950s.

It’s clear to me that if any other country should place weapons in space, the United States must follow suit.  The question is, shouldn’t we be first?

Given the proliferation of spacefaring entities, proponents of a robust space warfare strategy believe that arming the heavens is inevitable and that it would be best for the U.S. to get there first with firepower. Antisatellite and space-based weapons, they argue, will be necessary not only to defend U.S. military and commercial satellites but also to deny any future adversary the use of space capabilities to enhance the performance of its forces on the battlefield.

Disturbing to me, though, is this.  Barack Obama, has stated the following regarding national defense:

Obama will not weaponize space?

Obama will set a goal for a world without nuclear weapons?

What?  How realistic is that?  When China puts weapons in space, and they will put them there eventually, are we to sit back with missiles aiming at us pretending that they aren’t there?

We are the superpower.  Is Obama saying he wants to give that up?

Is that the change he’s talking about?  The change of power?