By Bruce Gagnon,
Op-ed published by Portland Press Herald, 31 August 2025
A new treaty banning all weapons in space is the only way to prevent a future calamity.
Bruce K. Gagnon is the coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space. He lives in Brunswick.
I read with great interest the recent Associated Press article titled “Hijacked satellites and orbiting space weapons: In the 21st century, space is the new battlefield.” It was full of half-truths and manipulations that we’ve come to expect from the Pentagon and the military industrial complex.
While in the Air Force during the Vietnam War, I read the infamous Pentagon Papers that revealed how our government lied to the public, the Congress and the media to create the support for the war. We witnessed a similar story repeated in 2003 with “shock and awe” in Iraq and supposed weapons of mass destruction.
I’ve been coordinating the Global Network since its founding in 1992 while then living in Florida. In 1997, we obtained a copy of the Space Command’s internal document “Vision for 2020” that declared the U.S. would “control space, dominate space and deny other nations access to space.” Since that time the Pentagon and the aerospace industry have done everything possible to create a new arms race in space that they long ago stated would be “the largest industrial project in human history.”
For more than 30 years, China and Russia have gone to the United Nations proposing a new space treaty called PAROS (Prevention of an Arms Race in Space). At the general assembly, in a vote on the nonbinding resolution, it overwhelmingly passes despite the U.S. and Israel voting “No.” The treaty proposal is then sent to Geneva’s Conference on Disarmament for negotiation. There the U.S. and Israel block the treaty.
The official position of the U.S. (through Democrat and Republican administrations) has been “There are no weapons in space, we don’t need a new treaty.” The Global Network’s position has always been “Close the door to the barn before the horse gets out.” But the U.S. has always intended to be the dominant power in space. That is how wars are created.
China and Russia have steadily responded, telling the U.S. that they will not allow Washington to be the “Master of Space” — a slogan over the doorway at the Space Command HQ in Colorado.
NASA has long predicted that war in space will create the Kessler Syndrome — a cascading field of space debris as satellites are destroyed. The outcome would be that much of the Earth would go dark as so many things in our high-tech civilization are linked to space satellites.
The Pentagon has a plan, though. Its strategy is to fund a slew of launch providers around the world to, in a short time during a war in space, put into orbit new military mini-satellites to replace those that were destroyed. One such potential launch provider is bluShift Aerospace in Brunswick.
The CEO of bluShift, in answering a question from me, admitted that his corporation was being funded by NASA and the U.S. Space Force to launch mini-satellites in a time of crisis in order to keep China and Russia from filling up the already overly congested Lower Earth Orbit (LEO).
The only way to peace and security in space is via a new treaty to ban all weapons in space. We delay such a move at our own peril.
See: Original Article
