David J. Williams

The revolution in military strategy that the arming of the heavens heralded extended to every arena of warfare. By the 2020s, it was already accepted as axiomatic that whoever controlled space would control the world. But the thousandfold nuances and corollaries to this basic postulate took some time to work out—and left a myriad questions in their wake.

Certainly, it was recognized fairly early on that the ability to project power from space onto the ground rendered the heartlands of the major powers more vulnerable to swift attack than ever before. While in the 20th century satellites stood by to give notice of ballistic missile launch, and fighter-jets patrolled those areas through which bombers would have to pass, now space-based munitions would be able to rain destruction down on any point with little or no warning. All the more so as many of those weapons would be traveling at the speed-of-light, since directed energy weapons attained maturity well before the middle of the twenty-first century.

Consequently, as the Second Cold War intensified, the two superpowers redirected resources toward a defense in depth around the (extensive) geographies under their direct control. In the new paradigm, ground- and aircraft-based lasers and missiles would join forces with their counterparts in space to respond to attacks that hurtled in from beyond the bounds of air—and to grapple directly with the sources of those attacks. One secondary outcome of this stance was that it rendered Europe’s efforts to ensure that it would not be the cauldron of a future conflict tolerable to both superpowers: the margin of advantage that would have been provided through European bases was, ultimately, negligible. Yet it should be noted that most of the neutral powers did not fare as well as the Euro Magnates. Many of them—particularly those that occupied valuable equatorial territory (the ideal point for launch-sites)—found themselves absorbed within the superpowers’ defense grids so that the ever-growing launch architectures could maximize their ground-to-space capacity.

From the perspective of civilians dwelling within the U.S. or the Coalition, however, the most significant implication of the mass deployment of space-based munitions was the end of the era of mutual assured destruction (MAD). For, although it was true that the distance that nuclear-tipped missiles had to travel was now far shorter, the rise of space-based defense systems and speed-of-light weaponry meant that any missile could in theory be stopped. In fact, it was highly likely that any one missile would be stopped. This in turn resulted in the targeting of both nuclear and conventional warheads away from civilian sites and toward military ones; to do otherwise would have been to waste weapons that could have been used on targets with counterforce capabilities.

Furthermore, the actual importance of nuclear weapons diminished with the rise of hyper-precise firepower. There was, after all, little sense in using a politically problematic nuke when a powerful conventional device or a directed energy broadside would do just as well. Yet the sweeping aside of the MAD era left at least some military planners feeling somewhat nostalgic: whereas a city-busting nuclear exchange had always been at once both the standard wargaming conclusion in a clash between the superpowers of bygone days—as well as the central factor that made such a war less likely—now that certainty was gone. Was conflict more probable? If so, to what extent had that probability increased? How might such a confrontation play out? And how might it end? These were questions that persisted even after the Zurich Treaty . . .

(To be cond.)

Tags: books, future of war, Mirrored Heavens, novel, science fiction, scifi, SF

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 15th, 2008 at 9:06 am and is filed under Geopolitics, Mirrored Heavens, Weaponization of space, Weaponry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.