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Achieving space security
Twilight War: The Folly of U.S. Space Dominance by Mike Moore. Oakland, CA: The Independent Institute, 2008, 416 pp.
The Politics of Space Security: Strategic Restraint and the Pursuit of National Interests by James Clay Moltz. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008, 384 pp.
John M. Logsdon
These two books, although very different in intent and style, converge on a fundamental conclusion: If the United States wants to continue to enjoy the benefits of space security, defined by James Clay Moltz as "the ability to place and operate assets outside the Earth's atmosphere without external interference, damage, or destruction," there is a "compelling logic to the exercise of military restraint." Indeed, he suggests, all nations active in space should exercise such restraint "because of their shared national interest in maintaining safe access to critical regions of space." For example, it is in the common interest to avoid actions that create space debris and threaten the environment of outer space, such as the January 2007 Chinese test of an antisatellite device or the February 2008 U.S. destruction of a reentering National Reconnaissance Office satellite. Both books suggest that the space environment is, as Moltz puts it, "too valuable to be used for war."
Mike Moore is the former editor of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a periodical with a strong arms control perspective, and thus it is not surprising that Twilight War is an extended tract arguing against the desirability of U.S. space dominance. This concept is defined as an overwhelming advantage in space capability that would allow the United States to control who has access to outer space and what is done there, and, if it so chooses, to use space as an arena for the projection of U.S. military power. Moore suggests that a coherent group of "space warriors" in the Department of Defense, the Air Force, various think tanks, Congress, the aerospace industry, and, at least during its first term, the Bush administration, believes that the capability to dominate space should be a toppriority U.S. goal. Moore writes that this view "is uniquely in tune with twenty-first century American triumphalism," defined as the belief that "America's values, perhaps divinely inspired, ought to be the world's values." Indeed, throughout...