China Calls for a Ban on Space Weapons (Space Treaty Hurting US Security)

[FrankRep]

China Calls for a Ban on Space Weapons
Space Treaty has Hurt US Security


Art Thompson | John Birch Society
27 August 2009


At a recent Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi, called for a ban on weapons in space. Since the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 does basically the same thing, why a new treaty?

The communists have a history of using the international pulpit to preach peace with a smile all while planning to wage, or actually waging, war. They have never advocated disarmament as a policy unless it was to get their enemies to agree and start disarming, while the communists themselves continue to arm.

We live up to our treaties, they do not.

The reason the West, primarily the United States, has to be lulled into a variety of treaties touching on our military and industrial capacity is that the communist bloc is incapable of meeting their own needs in any real war. Their system is flawed. It cannot even provide for its own people let alone to build a massive war machine.

Unless, of course, we give it to them.

In World War II the United States expended tremendous effort to supply Russia, and once again, at the present time we see the same thing with the exportation of our industry to China. Even our military secrets and some of our military production capabilities are being handed over to China.

China would still be an extremely backward country if it were not for the Washington Insiders’ financial and trade policies. Even so, outside of the main industrial and tourist areas, China cannot even call itself a third world country.

This is also the case elsewhere. Throughout the Cold War and even today, a façade of prosperity and industrial might has been cleverly presented to the West by Russia, and other than those areas of military weaponry necessary to scare the West, Russia’s economy was, and is, disastrous. In this modern age the people starve in the countryside, particularly during winter. The Potemkin village is still the stage.

So what is behind this move by China?

It is difficult to be precise, but in the past it has usually meant that the communists are: 1) Buying time, or 2) fooling the people of the United States into not putting a new weapons system in place. This was the reason for the first Outer Space Treaty.

We were poised to end the Cold War in the 1960s with a weapons system called the X-20 Dyna-Soar. It was to be a fleet of manned space bombers not unlike the Space Shuttle, capable of delivering nuclear warheads anywhere on Earth with no defense system capable of stopping us. In its entry on the Dyna-Soar program, Wikipedia notes that Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the Moon, was for a time among the astronauts slated to test the X-20. There were other plans for U.S. developed space based weapons, including one based on the Gemini program.

The Outer Space Treaty bans nuclear warheads from space. It also declares that the moon is the common heritage of mankind and no country can place a claim to the moon or any other celestial body.

This begs a question: Besides the United States, who else has landed on the moon?

Dyna-Soar was well on its way, with hundreds of millions of dollars spent, and we were ready to build the first prototype when the treaty process got under way. Ultimately, the program was abandoned when it was opposed by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. The Outer Space Treaty effectively ended all subsequent programs to contribute to the defense of the United States in space.


SOURCE:
http://www.jbs.org/jbs-news-feed/5273

[Zippyjuan]

The Outer Space Treaty was in 1967 while the X-20 was cancelled in 1963- four years earlier.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-20_Dyna-Soar

On 19 January 1963 the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, directed the Air Force to undertake a study to determine whether Gemini or Dyna-Soar was the more feasible approach to a space-based weapon system. In the middle of March 1963, after receiving the study, Secretary McNamara "stated that the Air Force had been placing too much emphasis on controlled re-entry when it did not have any real objectives for orbital flight".[1] This was seen as a reversal of the Secretary's earlier position on the Dyna-Soar program. Dyna-Soar was also an expensive program that would not launch a manned mission until the mid-1960s at the earliest. This high cost and questionable usefulness made it hard for the Air Force to justify the program. Eventually, the X-20 Dyna-Soar program was canceled on 10 December 1963.

On the day that X-20 was cancelled, the Air Force announced another program, the Manned Orbiting Laboratory, a spin-off of Gemini, but this was also eventually canceled.