The president is apparently going to skip the moon and take on Mars. New technologies make this far more feasible by cutting the transit time between planets to 39 days. While I’m not necessarily in favor of manned missions (you can do more science cheaper and with less risk), the idea of enabling commercial flight to orbit and refocusing NASA on deep space is a huge step in the right direction.
On the other hand, Obama’s nuclear strategy — emphasizing disarmament in order to strengthen nonproliferation — is about to have its first application as the Pentagon reviews nuclear policy:
The lead story in Saturday’s Washington Post, about the nuclear weapons decisions facing President Obama, runs longer than 1,300 words, but five a reader won’t find are “cost,” “dollars,” “money,” “debt,” or “deficit.” A reader would also search in vain for any talk of a “fiscal crisis” or a need to balance nuclear weapons priorities with available revenues.
That same reader, of course, rarely has to venture past the first sentence of a health care reform story to find that the subject is a “trillion dollar overhaul.” Occasionally, it’s noted that the trillion dollars is spread over ten years.
I’d like to see more attention to the outrageous costs of the American nuclear arsenal, but what intrigues me most is the suggestion that Obama might end the 50-year old nuclear “triad” of bombers, submarines, and ICBMs. This policy was the most wasteful defense procurement scam of the 20th Century and the fact it’s still in place 20 years after the Cold War’s end is nothing less than a crime.
Nuclear bombers must be the first to go. There hasn’t been a strategic use for this leg of the triad since the late 1960s; any US-Soviet exchange would be over long before bombers could get to their targets. The Air Force “bomber mafia” is long out of favor in the Pentagon anyway. A stroke of the pen would end the fiasco tomorrow.
The choice between subs and ICBMs, however, may prove a little more nuanced. Submarines are a far more secure platform than silo-based missiles; during the Cold War the Navy used the spectre of a Soviet first strike to make a case for “guaranteed response,” i.e. the USSR would be unable to knock out America’s vengeance with a sneak-attack. While that argument no longer carries water in today’s world, submarines are still able to hide themselves where large concrete silos cannot.
But the Navy may be willing to give up on its strategic nuclear role anyway. The wettest branch has long wanted more responsibility for the kind of net-centric, low-intensity warfare of the 21st Century; but the idea of having submarines carry both conventional AND nuclear missiles has plenty of security professionals worried about the perceptions involved.
Ultimately, having America’s last nuclear deterrent housed inside the United States may provide the best optics for nuclear disarmament efforts. But what do nukes and Mars missions have in common? Let’s take a step back to the halcyon days of Rumsfeld’s Pentagon:
CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts — Tensions ran high at the United Nations recently when the United States delivered a hard-line statement defending its right to develop space-based weapons.
Responding to international pressure in recent weeks, John Mohanco, the deputy director of the U.S. Office of Multilateral Nuclear and Security Affairs, said “our government will continue to consider the possible role that space-related weapons may play in protecting our [space] assets.”
The statement followed an alarming change of course last year when the United States became the first country to oppose the annual non-binding UN resolution, “Preventing an Arms Race in Outer Space.”
The rest of the world deems it important to prevent an arms race in space, and wants a treaty to that effect. The need for such a treaty is compounded by the U.S. withdrawal in 2002 from the ABM Treaty, which included restrictions on space weapons.
The Bush era was characterized by a lot of bad ideas, but the worst of them was the militarization of space. While little-regarded here, Pentagon discussion of space-borne weaponry and a new generation of nuclear weapons got huge negative reaction in foreign press; it was as if the US expected, indeed wanted, a new Cold War.
A president serious about reforging America’s image abroad not only needs to rejoin the international consensus on space, but reassert the nation’s interest in exploration. These two things actually go together, just as they did in the days of Neil Armstrong and detente.
