War in Heaven: Stopping the Arms Race in Outer Space

By Helen Caldicott and Craig Eisendrath, The New Press. Posted June 12, 2007.

A new book reveals Bush's revamped national space policy. It lays the basis for a radical change of U.S. policy toward outer space -- the deployment of weapons.

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• Total number of U.S. satellites in outer space: 413

• Total number of satellites in space from all other countries combined: 382

• U.S. Department of Defense spending on space in 2006: $22.5 billion

War in Heaven

The Arms Race in Outer Space

Helen Caldicott and Craig Eisendrath

hardcover

$23.95 / £13.99 / $29.95 CAN

A revelatory look at the U.S. government's plan to put weapons in outer space, by two bestselling experts

During the early portion of the twenty-first century, space power will also evolve into a separate and equal medium of warfare. . . . The emerging synergy of space superiority with land, sea, and air superiority will lead to Full Spectrum Dominance.
—FROM “U.S. SPACE COMMAND VISION FOR 2020”

When most of us think about the potential of outer space for future generations, we think of world communications, satellite navigation, and scientific exploration. U.S. Space Command, however, thinks about weapons. Believing that conflict in space and wars fought from space are inevitable, the president has called on the agency to weaponize outer space and thus provoke an arms race that could cost the United States trillions of dollars and could lead to the demise of the human race.

In War in Heaven, a Nobel Prize–nominated peace activist and a former U.S. foreign service officer (who helped write the Outer Space Treaty of 1967) look at the history of military uses of space and the current plans for “militarizing the heavens,” including kinetic, laser, nuclear bombardment, and anti-satellite weapons. Contrary to the claims of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that the United States faces a “space Pearl Harbor,” Caldicott and Eisendrath show that the United States itself is today the principal obstruction to passage of an international treaty banning weapons from outer space.

At a time when plans to build and deploy space weapons are on the administration’s agenda but only just becoming known to the general public, this book will help launch a national discussion of a critical issue.

Helen Caldicott is the co-founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility, president of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute, and a Nobel Peace Prize nominee. She divides her time between Australia and Washington, D.C. Craig Eisendrath is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and author, most recently, of Bush League Diplomacy. He lives in Philadelphia.