Customer Reviews

Star Wars: US Tools of Space Supremacy

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I bought this book thinking it was about space technology. After all, there's a rocket on the cover and the title makes it sound as though it's about hardware. But this is in fact a political diatribe against U.S. military space policy and our foreign policy in general. It blames the U.S. for not only all evil on Earth, but most of it above. Now, I am myself a strong critic of much of out country's recent actions and the Bush administration, but this book is COMPLETELY one-sided and does not describe any "tools" at all. I actually threw it away after reading it, it was just that uninteresting.

"Star Wars: U.S. Tools of Space Supremacy" by Loring Wirbel is a sobering account of space-based technologies and U.S. foreign policy. The author draws on his years of experience researching the defense industry to discuss how space technologies have evolved incrementally from the Cold War to today. The book paints a frightening picture of the unprecedented and virtually unchecked powers that are currently at the disposal of U.S. policy makers.

Mr. Wirbel details numerous government-funded space technology programs while discussing the national security objectives and philosophies that guided their creation. We find a desire to achieve military domination evident at the start of the Cold War but realized only recently with the demise of deterrence in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks. The author painstakingly lays out a detailed chronology of how technological innovations have advanced in lock-step with increasingly bold and assertive U.S. foreign policies over the past forty years. In that light, the emergence of George W. Bush's unabashedly unilateralist administration is but an explicit expression of a U.S.-controlled world order that has existed well before the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Among the book's many attributes is the debunking of Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) as a purely defensive program. The reader learns how the reality differs from the sales pitch delivered to the American people. Technologies related to the SDI program were in fact used to great effect for communications and surveillance purposes in conflicts in Central America, the Middle East and elsewhere. Interestingly, Mr. Wirble suggests that the outgoing administration of George Bush Sr. had set the table for meaningful disarmament. The author faults Bill Clinton for not seizing the historic opportunity to create a peace dividend in the first post-Cold War administration. Instead, full funding during the 1990s allowed the space technologies industries to mature and gain deadly sophistication, as demonstrated in Kosovo and Columbia later in the decade.

However, the failures to capture Osama Bin Laden and to win a decisive victory in the latest Iraq War underscores the limitations of space-based technologies and the application of force to achieve U.S. objectives. Instead, Mr. Wirbel advocates a ban on space weapons and an increased reliance on diplomacy and multilateralism as expressed through organizations such as the United Nations. He believes that peace activists must forge alliances with environmentalists and others to find humane solutions to contemporary political problems.

I recommend this book to those who may be concerned about the U.S.' projection of power into space and the implications it may have for our collective security on earth.