On Monday the UK Ministry of Defence released its first ‘Defence Space Strategy‘ ominously sub-titled ‘Operationalising the Space Domain’. The report contained new spending commitments of an additional £1.4bn over 10 years to “to protect UK interests in space”, though it did not define what these interest might be.
This is on top of the £5bn of public money already committed to upgrading the UK’s Skynet military communications satellite system, over a similar period.
This Skynet should not be confused with:
- The US Skynet – an NSA AI accused of wrongly targeting drones against thousands of civilians in Pakistan
- The Chinese Skynet – controversial mass surveillance AI, implicated in alleged racial targeting.
- The original military AI system gone rogue, destroying humanity in the popular Terminator film franchise.
While we might wonder why a dystopian sci-fi on the folly of endless militarism should inspire quite so many different state security forces, that is not what should truly concern us about military expansion into the heavens.
Keep Space for peace
The UK is a signatory to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which, enshrined space as ‘the province of all mankind’; prohibited weapons of mass destruction in space; and declared ‘the Moon and other celestial bodies shall be used exclusively for peaceful purposes’. There have been successive attempts to widen the prohibition to cover all weaponry in space, notably;
- Proposed ‘Prevention of an Arms Race in Space (PAROS)’ Treaty – initially proposed at the UN in 1981. The UN Conference on Disarmament has convened an adhoc PAROS committee annually ever since, with the support of the majority of world nations, historically progress has been vetoed by the United States.
- Proposed ‘Treaty on the Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space’ – proposed by Russia and China in 2014
Like Trump’s launch of a US Space Force in 2019, the launch last year of a UK Space Command is both hugely costly and needlessly provocative. The UK Space Command launched on April fools day and with all it’s laser graphics and sci-fi inspired naming schemes, it would be easy to dismiss it as an expensive joke. However, the expansion of war fighting to a fourth domain could have disastrous consequences, undermining global agreements and prompting a costly and polluting new arms race. As there is already such widespread international support for banning all weaponry in space – including from both our supposed ‘enemies’ and the majority of our NATO ‘allies’ – why do we seek to undermine that position?
For more information about the global campaign to ‘ Keep Space for Peace’, visit the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space.
