From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!npois!ucbvax!C70:arms-d Newsgroups: fa.arms-d Title: Arms-Discussion Digest V0 #133 Article-I.D.: ucb.1444 Posted: Tue Jun 29 01:01:42 1982 Received: Tue Jun 29 07:38:50 1982 >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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 28 Jun 1982 0229-PDT From: Jim McGrathSubject: 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 ------------------------------ Date: 28 Jun 1982 0246-PDT From: Jim McGrath Subject: US defenses From: Jon Webb 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 ------------------------------ Date: 3 June 1982 11:21-EDT (Thursday) From: Robert A. Carter 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. Re: Space Wars Thought this might be of interest..... *********************************************************************** 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. ------------------------------ End of Arms-D Digest ********************