C70:arms-d (06/29/82)
>From HGA@MIT-MC Tue Jun 29 00:47:53 1982
Arms-Discussion Digest Extra Volume 0 : Issue 133
Today's Topics:
Voting and Political Bandwidth
US defenses
Space Wars
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Date: 28 Jun 1982 0229-PDT
From: Jim McGrath <CSD.MCGRATH at SU-SCORE>
Subject: Voting and Political Bandwidth
From: CSVAX.upstill at Berkeley
Voting is such a low-bandwidth medium that it is impossible to
sustain the notion that the majority of people have much say
in the matter.
It is very low bandwidth as practiced in the USSR (ie one office, one
candidate). In the US you actually have a choice of what people you
want to govern the nation - as well as good sources of information
upon which to base a decision and monitor the government's actions.
You will also find your representatives helpful whenever they can be -
it is amazing what people who depend upon votes will do if you ask
them (most people never do, which only makes your voice when you do
ask them more powerful).
Jim
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Date: 28 Jun 1982 0246-PDT
From: Jim McGrath <CSD.MCGRATH at SU-SCORE>
Subject: US defenses
From: Jon Webb <Webb at Cmu-20c>
If you want to claim the analogy applies to the U.S., you'll
have to take into account its geography, which makes it
practically impossible to invade: a huge country separated by
oceans from any militarily significant nation.
Now you are confusing geography with technology. The US HAS been
invaded in the past by European powers. Ironically, the last two
times were both due to Great Britain (the revolution and the War of
1812). After the last of these conflicts we kept our noses clean, and
Europe played around with itself and the rest of the world, until
technological developments (steam powered ships and ironclads) made
naval invasion extremely difficult.
Great oceans are not enough to insure peace, although they make our
defense a lot easier. Our northern border is "safe" only because of
our dominance of Canada - ditto for the south with Mexico. A Cuban
style government in either country (which is not impossible) could
wreck havoc with our defenses. (Actually, we SHOULD attempt to absorb
both nations into the US for this and other reasons - then we really
would be far more secure).
Jim
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Date: 3 June 1982 11:21-EDT (Thursday)
From: Robert A. Carter <Carter at RUTGERS>
Subject: [Cretsinger: Space Wars]
And I in turn, thought this might interest the readers of Arms-D...
Date: Thursday, 3 June 1982 06:31-EDT
From: David J. <Cretsinger>
Re: Space Wars
Thought this might be of interest.....
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SPACE WARS: The Air Force readies a grand finale untouched
by human hands.
[An article by Lenny Siegel which appeared in The Progressive for June
1982.]
In the San Francisco Peninsula town of Sunnyvale, nestled in
the Lockheed Missiles and Space company complex at the interchange of
California highway 237 and US 101, stands a large, windowless building
known as the Blue Cube. A man who once worked there says the inside
looks like the set from a science fiction thriller:
"Not only are there locks on all the doors, but there are
locks on doors inside rooms with locks on doors inside rooms... I
think there are three floors inside, but I could never figure out for
sure."
There is no concealing the general mission of the Sunnyvale
Air Force Station, as the Blue cube is more formally known. A nearby
cluster of parabolic antennae--pointed every which way, like a jumble
of outsized teacups--makes it clear that the Cube has something to do
with the space age.
But few of the three thousand or so who work there, to say
nothing of the millions whose lives it may some day touch, are aware
of the installation's central role in a burgeoning space race that is
rapidly moving out of the realm of science fiction.
The Blue Cube is the nerve center of a far-flung system of
preparing for--and, if need be, waging--nuclear war in space. The
Blue Cube controls four-fifths of the fifty-odd U.S. military
satellites that now patrol the heavens; it links a vast network of
electronic listening and watching stations in most of the continents
and oceans of the Earth.
What even fewer realize is that, futuristic and zany though it
seems, the space war system symbolized by the Blue Cube is already
becoming outmoded. Concerned about the growing vulnerability of their
system to political disruption here on Earth, the planners and
developers are now hard at work on improvements that would move even
more of it out into space.
In order to free it from its earthly shackles, the architects
of the new military technology may be leading us to the ultimate
nuclear nightmare: a war waged against us by our own satellites.
The nuclear button in the hands of a robot 10,000 miles
overhead? It's not such a preposterous notion when you look at what's
happening in the realm of Command, Control, Communications, and
Intelligence, the technology known to nuclear strategists as C3I- or
*see-cubed-eye*.
Today, in America, space-war *see-cubed-eye* begins at
Sunnyvale's Blue Cube.
Some of the spacecraft operated by U.S. military and
intelligence agencies provide communications links to ground stations,
ships, aircraft, and other vehicles. Others emit signals to guide
military ships, aircraft, and missiles. Some satellite systems are
designed to detect missile launches or nuclear explosions. Several
spacecraft orbit the Earth collecting photographic and electromagnetic
intelligence. About one-third are in stationary orbit about 22,000
miles above the Earth; the rest follow a variety of paths across the
sky. All must be monitored or controlled from the ground.
The Blue Cube is the busiest of the military ground stations.
Today it handles forty satellites; four years hence, when a second
control facility is scheduled to open near Colorado Springs, it will
manage sixty-five.
Sunnyvale monitors and evaluates reconnaissance data from Air
Force satellites, tracking and controlling ther path and orientation
of each orbiting spacecraft. This is not as simple as it sounds.
For instance, if U.S. intelligence officials want
high-resolution photographs of a particular spot in the Ural
Mountains, they must maneuver a reconnaissance satellite into the
appropriate orbit and then bring it to its perigee-the lowest
point-over the target. At the same time, the orbit must be carefully
calculated to ensure that the spacecraft does not dip too deep into
the atmosphere and burn up. In addition, the satellite must be
oriented, without pitching or rolling, so that its picture-taking eye
is fixed on the target.
As the lead station in the Air Force's Satellite Control
Facility (SCF), Sunnyvale operates in concert with remote tracking
stations in Hawaii, Guam, Australia, the Seychelles, and Greenland.
The remote stations, equipped with the same teacup antennae, maintain
two-way contact with U.S. spacecraft when they are beyond Sunnyvale's
line of sight.
The SCF ground stations cooperate closely with another Air
Force network called Spacetrack, a worldwide radar and telescope
system which reports all orbiting objects to the North American Air
Defense Command (NORAD) underground headquarters at Cheyenne Mountain,
near Colorado Springs.
While the Satellite Control Facility keeps the United States
in contact with its own military spacecraft, Spacetrack follows *all*
space objects-especially those sent aloft by the Soviet Union. At its
core is the Air Force's missile defense radar system, which includes
the BMEWS (Ballistic Missile Early Warning System) sites in Alaska,
Greenland, and England; mammoth, ten-story electronic towers in
Massachusetts and northern California, and radar outposts in Florida,
Massachusetts, and North Dakota, the Aleutian Islands, and the Central
Pacific missile range. These, in turn, are supplemented by
electro-optical surveillance stations-telescopes linked to television
cameras-in California, New Zealand, South Korea, and Italy. The
latter will soon be repalaced with more sensitive devices now being
installed in New Mexico, Hawaii, South Korea, the Azores, and Diego
Garcia in the mid-Indian Ocean.
Another important U.S. military satellite system is the
Defense Support Program, which relies on three stationary satellites
to detect Soviet missile launches as they occur, beaming the warning
down to two Earth stations-one at Buckley Field near Colorado Springs
and the other at Pine Gap, Australia, near the outback community of
Alice Springs.
Under construction is another satellite network, the NAVSTAR
Global Positioning System, which is designed to supply extremely
accurate navigational signals to U.S. weapons systems. By the late
1980s, NAVSTAR will have added eighteen new operational satellites to
be managed by additional overseas facilities in such places as the
Philippines, Diego Garcia, and Ascension, a British island in the
South Atlantic.
Still on the drawing board are schemes to put up
communications satellites that would orbit halfway to the moon, to
develop satellites which might detect submerged Soviet submarines and
communicate with diving U.S. submarines, and to devise
satellite-to-satellite communication systems. Such plans spring from
the realization that the most high-flying of space war systems is no
stronger than its weakest link on Earth.
First there is the problem of military vulnerability. Because
their large radio antennae, their telescopes and spherical radomes
must be plainly in view to maintain line-of-sight contact with
satellites; and because of their location in widely scattered and
often remote places, the ground stat5ions are sitting ducks for attack
by saboteurs or organized military forces-to say nothing of the
warheads that would be headed their way at the first sign of nuclear
hostilities.
And then there is the problem of *political* vulnerability.
The United States got a foretaste of this in 1975 when Turkey,
angered by America's adverse reaction to its invasion of Cyprus, shut
down the Spacetrack radar station at Diyarbakir. Another shock came
when the collapse of the U.S.-backed regime in Ethiopia led to the
closing of the American communications station at Kagnew, believed to
be a satellite control facility.
The satellite tracking station now going into Diego Garcia was
originally planned for Iran, but the 1978-79 revolution swept away the
U.S. intelligence apparatus in that country. (In fact, TRW, Inc.,
contractor for the new tracking stations, has recommended that future
Middle EAstern and East Atlantic terminals be "relocatable" in case of
changes in the political climate.)
One politically sensitive terminal is the Seychelles tracking
station, located in the southwestern Indian Ocean due south of the
Ural Mountains and the Persian Gulf. The Marxist regime of President
France Albert Rene recently renewed the lease for what has become the
republic's largest single employer.
Even in conservative Australia, normally a cooperative U.S.
military partner, the Pine Gap tracking station at Narrungar have
caused friction. Many Australians believe protection of the U.S.
operation at Pine Gap from domestic inquiry was at the root of
Governor-General Sir John Kerr's dissolution of the Labor government
of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in 1975. (See "America's Mysterious
'Space Base' Down Under," by Peter L. Young, in The Progressive, July
1980.) The presence of American intelligence and communications bases
has given rise in recent years to protest demonstrations in Sydney,
Melbourne, and other Australian cities.
As a hedge against the military and political vulnerability of
the ground stations, military planners are building redundancy into
the system. Sunnyvale's Blue Cube can take over from the remote
tracking stations if necessary, although that would delay the
transmission of data and commands. The alternate Blue Cube now under
construction near Colorado Springs will duplicate many of Sunnyvale's
functions.
But redundancy is not enough. The Air force also is
developing small mobile ground terminals, reportedly in large
trailers. Like the proposed MX missile system, these critical C3I
facilities would be constantly on the move. But here are drawbacks;
The mobile terminals would be able to carry out only a small part of
the work and, because of their size and distinctive appearance, they,
too, would be detectable by hostile satellites.
Having exhausted the limits of redundancy and mobility, the
Pentagon is now investigating the possibilities of spacecraft
*autonomy* in its search for survivable satellite systems. It is an
ominous step.
Thus far, the search has been limited to "direct data
relays"-the transmitting of data *satellite-to-satellite* without
using any intermediary ground facilities. In the future, however, the
Pentagon hopes to develop completely self-controlled satellite
systems.
What does that mean? Robert Cooper, head of the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), suggested one of the
implications in a report carried recently by Aviation Week: "The
aerospace industry needs to intensify technology work in robotics and
onboard data computation that will allow spacecraft to function
totally independent of human ground control." To carry out that aim,
the Air Force is currently negotiating with several major universities
for establishment of a $7.2 million aerospace robotics laboratory.
*Spacecraft totally independent of human ground control.* That
may be the blueprint for future space wars-wars from which the Earth
itself and the humans on it have been cut out of the loop. In our
search for security more certain than our imperfect earthly human
systems can provide, we may wind up putting the nuclear button in the
hands of a robot in the sky.
The command, control, communications, and intelligence systems
that girdle the globe and threaten to achieve a life of their own in
space have become the essence of the nuclear arms race. The race to
oblivion has become a contest best measured not by the number or size
of the warheads but by the accuracy, versatility, and relative
invulnerability of their delivery systems.
By the same token, resistance to the nuclear arms race must
take the rapidly advancing role of C3I into fuller account if arms
control and disarmament measures are to be rooted ;in reality. It
will no longer suffice to freeze, or even diminish, the mere
*quantity* of weapons.
Here and there, peace activists are focusing overdue attention
on the worldwide electronic ;tentacles of the nuclear arms race. The
Australian-based Association for International Cooperations and
Disarmament has p0ointed to Pine Gap and Narrungar as Australia's
avenues to vulnerability and complicity. In Denmark, where
long-standing government policy prevents the deployment of nuclear
arms, attention is beginning to fall on the U.S. Air Force's elaborate
strategic electronic presence in Danish-owned Greenland.
But do they realize the connection in Guam, in South Korea, on
Ascension, in the Seychelles? Do they understand what's happening
under the big white radomes at Concrete, North Dakota, and at
Fylingdales Moor in England? Do they know it in Sunnyvale?
Most of the world is still a long way from understanding how
busily the Earth and its environs are being wired right now for
nuclear war.
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End of Arms-D Digest
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