FLASH
Shkruar nga Pamfleti
More than forty years ago, on March 23, 1983, Ronald Reagan stunned America and the world by announcing a plan to achieve absolute US military supremacy in space. The goal: to create a complex system of weapons hovering over our heads – armed satellites, laser cannons, anti-missile systems and more – capable of neutralizing any nuclear attack on Earth.
The Republican President's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), defined by the US government as a "space shield", was immediately renamed by everyone to Star Wars: inevitable, since we were in the middle of the cinematic saga. Moreover, a few years ago Star Trek had brought to the screen scenarios not too different from those imagined by Reagan. And now it was the actor-president himself who used the suggestion of the big screen in announcing his plan: rejecting the logic of the "balance of terror," Reagan defined the doctrine of "assurance of mutual destruction" as a "suicide pact ".
Better to be sure that you are able to neutralize any Russian attack. "We will keep the peace by force: weakness is an invitation to aggression", was his response to the protests in Moscow. Then, the cinematic conclusion: "We will give a new hope to our children." "New Hope", as the title of the next Star Wars movie would be.
Major projects, massive investments and a complex military organization entrusted to General Abrahamson. Four years later, in 1987, the American Physical Society decided that implementing Reagan's plan was impossible: it was based on technologies that did not yet exist. It would take decades to get there.
Reagan's plan, aimed at destroying Soviet nuclear weapons on the ground, excluded space-based nuclear weapons, such as those apparently in the Kremlin's plans today. This is because in 1967, the USA and the USSR had signed the "Outer Space Treaty": a treaty on nuclear non-proliferation in space. That treaty is still in force, but it's not surprising that the Kremlin may have devised a plan that ignores it: Putin has already denounced various nuclear non-proliferation treaties and may also withdraw Russia from the space treaty.
In 1993, Bill Clinton unceremoniously ended SDI's futile adventure. Forty years later, little remains of Reagan's dream of stellar military supremacy: America has already seen China's great advance in military electronics, even in space.
Moscow and Beijing have been working hard to build robotic satellites capable of interfering, in orbit, with adversary satellites, and even attacking them. The three space powers – the US, China and Russia – have demonstrated that they can destroy satellites with their rockets, and Moscow has done so with kamikaze satellites, which, moreover, when they explode, scatter dangerous pieces of debris into space. For several years, the Pentagon has responded by adding a Space Force to the traditional arms of the Army, Navy and Air Force. And in 2019, with Trump in the White House, a law to restart defense investment created the Space Development Agency: an effort to restart the military occupation of space thanks to digital technologies and artificial intelligence that could give it sustainability old Reagan dream.
Clearly disturbing and also difficult to understand scenarios. It is not clear, in fact, how a "war between satellites" would play out, especially the nuclear war of Russian weapons: at the time of Reagan's "Star Wars", only 360 satellites orbited the Earth. Today, between surveillance, espionage, telecommunications, GPS guidance, etc., according to the UN, there are about ten thousand satellites in orbit. And those of Elon Musk's Starlink communications (currently 5,500 but will be added) are a little bigger than a shoebox./Corriere della Sera – Bota.al
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