Space without Weapons: "How to move forward: NGO Approaches and Initiatives for
addressing Space Security
By Rebecca Johnson, The Acronym Institute for Disarmament
Diplomacy.
Notes for presentation at Joint Conference on 'Future
Security in Space: Commercial, Military and Arms Control
Trade-Offs', the Monterey Institute of International Studies and
the Mountbatten Centre, May 28-29, 2002.
This paper was published in James Clay Moltz (ed), Future Security in
Space: Commercial, Military, and Arms Control Trade-Offs,
Monterey Institute Center for Nonproliferation Studies and
Mountbatten Centre for International Studies, Occasional Paper No.
10 (July 2002)."
(Excerpt on Space Preservation Bill)
The most uncompromising of the NGOs working on space issues, the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space, helped initiate and strongly supports a Space Preservation Bill tabled in the House of Representative by Dennis Kucinich (Democrat-Ohio) as HR 3616 (January 2002) In essence, the bill calls on the U.S. to ban all research, development, testing, and deployment of space-based weapons. If passed, it would also require the United States to enter negotiations toward an international treaty to ban weapons in space. The Global Network is now soliciting American groups and individuals and international groups to pledge their support to Kucinich's Bill. Such initiatives, although unlikely to be successful per se, can be very useful in raising the issue and focussing public and political attention. There is, however, one potential danger that has to be taken into account by proponents of national legislation and particularly by advocates of early international treaty negotiations: that premature legislative initiatives may also serve to focus and strengthen the opposition to such measures, thereby "inoculating" the issue against later, more pragmatically targeted initiatives to prevent the weaponisation of space. I am not making an argument against initiatives such as the Kucinich Bill, which can be a very helpful rallying point for activists, so much as sounding a note of caution about how it is used.
Read the whole text