The dilemmas of weapons in space are illuminated from the archives

In “Weapons in Space”, Aaron Bateman discusses the Cold War-era US Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI), known as the ‘Star Wars’ programme. The hope animating the idea was to extinguish the need for nuclear weapons. In practice, SDI would have seen missile interceptors based in space.

The book is not the first one written about SDI. For example, Frances FitzGerald wrote about Reagan’s role in the programme, and Donald Baucom focussed on the origins of SDI.

Bateman’s book sheds new light by focusing on the technology behind SDI and discussing the military use of space at the time. Drawing on previously classified documents, Bateman pulls back the curtain on political and diplomatic discussions. While rooted in the past, the book is a serious contribution to contemporary international security scholarship because we continue to have concerns about the weaponisation of space today.

Space history

Bateman’s subject matter has long brought together different fields of study and interest: space security aficionados, missile defence experts, and Cold War historians.

Those looking for a historical perspective will not be disappointed. Bateman describes internal debates at the time, tracking quarrels between ministerial departments, including the early discussions of where space should sit in the defence infrastructure.

Space security is front and centre in this book’s look at the SDI. The arms control discussions brought to the fore through the anti-satellite (ASAT) potential of SDI technology will give reason to pause: aren’t we still debating this? As Bateman says, “the lack of consensus today […] is directly connected to issues left unresolved at the end of the Cold War.” The topic of SDI dominated and affected many discussions at the time – the broader implications even extended to the emergence of the European market. Bateman pulls all these implications and topics together while keeping a coherent narrative.

For those uninitiated about space security and SDI, the first few chapters lay out the historical context of anti-satellite weapons testing and arms control treaties and discuss how these elements played into deterrence. They entail a comprehensive history of why space arms control has not been achieved and why internal dynamics within the US national security complex translated into warring priorities during the Cold War.

Notably, the book’s early chapters set out why ASATs and SDI are so intimately entangled: interceptors based in space designed to hit missiles in their boost phase can also serve as anti-satellite weapons without modifications. As a result, the idea to protect the world from a conflict going nuclear simultaneously opened up the opportunity for a perpetual risk to satellites in orbit.

Furthermore, the fact that the Soviet Union had already tested ASATs at the time also increased the vulnerability of the system of sensors and interceptors placed in orbit. Throughout the book, it becomes clear that US President Ronald Reagan was so enamoured with this idea and so caught up in a vision of a nuclear-free world that the reality of the technology behind the system was almost secondary to him.

First, SDI could not defend against all nuclear delivery systems. Further, as Bateman’s archival research reveals, Reagan distinguished between ASAT weapons as offensive and SDI technology as defensive, even though the technology is the same (and he was repeatedly told so).

These chapters also outline military thinking about space at the time. There was the now-outdated debate around space as high ground, the initial thinking around military space doctrine, and the traditional military concepts applied to space. In short, there was little in the way of a comprehensive military strategy involving space capabilities at the time. Bateman sprinkles his narrative with information and anecdotes from the primary source material, allowing the reader an insight into the footnotes of history.

This becomes most prominent in the chapter that discusses the European perspective. While the book situates SDI within the context of space security and space arms control, Bateman perhaps adds the most original research value in the chapter on European involvement, specifically the British perspective. Here, the value of Bateman’s approach to archive-based research is revealed.

The internal discussions and the European competition over contracts were met with the reality that neither the UK nor Germany received the biggest contracts (it was Israel). Former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s policy of exceptionalism will sound familiar in a post-Brexit context, in which exceptionalist phrases and a somewhat hesitant approach towards larger European efforts again tint the UK’s current space policy documents.

Timeless trade-offs

In the latter chapters, the vulnerability of the proposed systems through a potential attack by Soviet ASATs is again highlighted through the dilemma that curbing ASATs by implementing arms control (to limit the development of Soviet ASATs) would, in turn, also harm SDI. The technologies needed for SDI can also be used as ASATs and would therefore breach any treaty involving kinetic interceptors. The intent was that SDI would eventually involve laser technology. However, in the immediate term, it was always likely that kinetic interceptors would fill the gap, at least for some time, considering that the development of destructive lasers had not evolved enough at the time. It becomes clear that the freedom of manoeuvre to act in space, specifically for the purpose of SDI, became a top priority. Anyone wondering why space arms control remains an unresolved topic will feel more rooted in reality after reading the book.

The problems Bateman describes still trouble us today. The idea of space-based interceptors for missile defence is now largely deemed ineffective (much too expensive and vulnerable to ASATs), but governments are facing a similar dilemma today. As space becomes more integrated into modern defence, it becomes increasingly targeted, too. How do we protect space assets without simultaneously weaponising space, thereby drawing the environment potentially closer to a conflict within it?

Bateman adds a novel perspective to the field of SDI in the context of space security – important work, not least because it sheds light on a historical programme with immediate relevance.