U.S. Open to Ideas for Limiting Space Weapons
PARIS -The U.S.
government on July 13 told the United Nations that the new U.S. space policy
represents "a departure" from the previous doctrine insofar as the
United States will now at least consider proposals to prevent an arms race in
space.
Speaking to the U.N.
Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, Frank A. Rose, deputy assistant secretary
in the U.S. State Department?s bureau of verification, compliance and
implementation, said U.S. authorities will now view measures to control
arms in space much as it does other arms control agreements.
The U.S. National
Space Policy issued June 28 by the administration of President Barack Obama
replaces the previous policy issued in 2006. The new policy appears to assign a
higher priority to international collaboration, and indicates a willingness to
discuss how an arms agreement might apply to systems in space or targeting
space-based assets.
Rose confirmed the
new policy should be viewed as "a departure from the 2006 policy"
because U.S. authorities are now willing to "consider space-related
arms control concepts and proposals that meet the criteria of equitability
and effective verifiability, and which enhance the security of the United
States and its allies. This approach is consistent ? with the verification
standards that the United States has applied to other arms control
agreements."
Russia and China in
2008 submitted a joint draft treaty on arms control in space, but it was
rejected by the United States as having too many loopholes to be of value, and
lacking the means to verify that all spacefaring
nations were respecting the treaty?s terms. [Most
destructive space weapon concepts.]
Rose gave no
indication that the U.S. position with respect to the Russian-Chinese proposal
has changed. But he assured conference delegates the United States would no
longer oppose making space-related arms control a topic of debate at the
Conference on Disarmament, so long as the discussions do not rise to the level
of formal negotiations in view of a treaty.
U.S. policy, he said,
remains one of preserving space as a commons to which all nations should have
access for peaceful purposes. This
policy, he said, "allows space to be used for national and homeland
security activities," and also preserves the right of a nation to defend
its space-based assets from space- or ground-based interference.
"We will
continue to view the purposeful interference in space systems, including
supporting infrastructure, as an infringement of a nation?s rights, and act
accordingly," Rose said.
Rose said the United
States is adopting a more pro-active position in seeking international rules of
the road to minimize space debris, and to consult on space situational
awareness to prevent collisions in space.
The U.S. maintains
the world?s most sophisticated space-surveillance network of ground-based
sensors but it has been unclear in the past how willing the U.S. Air Force,
which operates the system, would be to share the information with the private
sector and with other nations.
The satellite
collision of an Iridium mobile communications craft with a retired Russian
spacecraft in February 2009, creating a new debris field in low Earth orbit,
has accelerated talks on collaboration on space surveillance. European
government officials say they have noticed a more-open attitude on the part of
U.S. government officials in U.S.-European talks about coordinating work on
space surveillance, both for debris mitigation and for other purposes.
Europe has begun its
own space-surveillance program. While still modest, it has given the United
States an added incentive to discuss how a trans-Atlantic cooperative effort
might be structured, according to European government officials.
Since late 2009, the
U.S. Air Force Joint Space Operations Center, located at Vandenberg Air Force
Base, Calif., has increased the number of operational satellites that it
watches closely.
The new space policy "commits
the United States to collaborate with industry and foreign nations to improve
space object data bases," Rose said in his address. "The policy calls
for collaboration on the dissemination of orbital tracking information,
including predictions of potentially hazardous conjunctions between orbiting
objects."
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