French Expert Sees Imminent Space Warfare

STOCKHOLM, Jan 29 (AFP) - The 20th century added a new dimension to warfare with the nuclear bomb, and the 21st could well be remembered for bringing the arms race into space, a French weapons expert said Thursday.

"Up until now, space has been militarized in the sense that military operations have made a lot of use of satellites ... either for communications, for navigation, for eavesdropping or for surveillance," Therese Delpech, the director for strategic affairs at the Atomic Energy Commission in Paris, told AFP in Stockholm.

"What is completely new," she added, "is what I call the weaponization of space, which is much more serious, and concerns the possibility in the (near) future of having weapons in space, or developing weapons that can destroy satellites in space. This would add another dimension to warfare."

This could be just a decade away, according to Delpech, in Stockholm for the first meeting of a new Swedish-funded international commission on weapons of mass destruction, which is headed by former UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix.

The independent commission, made up of 15 weapons experts from 15 countries, will over the next two years attempt to find ways of limiting the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, as well as on ways of disarming countries that already have such weapons.

While several commissioners emphasized the importance of addressing the continuing threat of nuclear proliferation, Delpech urged that greater attention be paid to a whole new generation of threats.

"I truly believe that the 20th century was the age of physics, while the 21st century will be the age of information technology and life sciences. And that holds the potential for horrifying military applications," she said, adding that developments in biological weapons gave of particular concern.

"There are much greater possibilities of dissimulating biological activities than nuclear activities. That's a real problem. ... The military applications are absolutely devastating," she said.

Lord save us from these buffoons. They think that just because something is in space, that it's super-special, somehow in need of their globalist perception of preserving it's "purity". Such stupidity has led to the Outer Space Treaty, which we ratified, and the moon treaty, which we didn't ratify. The Outer Space Treaty is so vague and hippy-like with silly, high-sounding rhetoric, that it's full of legal holes so it's not too much of a problem -yet. We will have to eventually back out of it when we start developing serious assets on the lunar surface. Most of the hippy-dippy dems would love to sign off on these feel-good UN treaties that bottle up our future possibilities.

"All the more reason to sell arms to the Chinese. /sarcasm"

Perhaps the frogs read this
http://www.connectionmagazine.org/2003_09/ts_killer_satellites.htm

Expert Says Chinese 'Killer Satellites' May Pose Serious Threat to U.S.

by Chad Groening

(AgapePress) An expert on Communist China says a Pentagon report will soon reveal that Beijing has made tremendous advances in space technology that may pose a serious national security threat to the United States.

John Tkacik is the research fellow in China policy at the Heritage Foundation (heritage.org). He says a soon-to-be-released report on China's military capability indicates that the communist country has made great strides in space technology, and may soon supplant the Russians as the number-two space power in the world.

Moreover, Tkacik says the Chinese are not pursuing peaceful purposes in space, but in fact are working on technology with military tactical and defensive applications.

"The Chinese already have their own global positioning satellites [that are] almost impossible to attack, and are developing A-SAT -- anti-satellite -- capabilities to bring down American surveillance and global positioning satellites," Tkacik says.

The researcher believes the Pentagon's findings should be taken seriously. "This report is not the idle speculation of fevered right-wingers in Washington's basements. These are the considered analyses of the top intelligence professionals in the Defense Department," he says.

Tkacik finds the report "sobering" and feels that having Chinese "killer satellites" in space is clearly unacceptable. He says the United States must take steps to develop defenses that can limit the impact of rocket-launched or missile-launched anti-satellite systems.

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