Star Wars: US Tools of Space Supremacy (Paperback)

by Loring Wirbel (Author) "Before rocketry had captured the imagination of either civilian scientists or military leaders as a near-term reality for space exploration or warfare, before nuclear weapons..." (more)
Key Phrases: signals intelligence satellites, space dominance, space intelligence, Air Force, Space Command, Defense Department (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
The expansion of space militarization forms a common thread with the explicit unilateral empire-building of the Bush administration. But just as Star Wars did not begin with the Missile Defense Agency, preventive war theory did not originate with Donald Rumsfeld. Advocates of military space always were on the front line of those demanding global dominance. Loring Wirbel argues that the seeds for the current space supremacy doctrine were sown at the end of the Cold War, in the early days of the Clinton administration. Examining the evolution of space-based tools, Wirbel shows that missile defense strategy is part of a dangerous US move to wage endless preventive war and demand global supremacy over allies and adversaries alike.

Star Wars: US Tools of Space Supremacy provides a fresh look at the role of space as an enabler of the Bush administration's plans for endless preventive war. It debunks the benign notions of missile defence, and expands the definition of space supremacy beyond that of weapons in space, to include the unilateral misuse of space-based intelligence, communications, and targeting technologies.

About the Author
Loring Wirbel has been involved in military conversion and peace work for 25 years. He is currently editorial director for communications initiatives at CMP Media LLC, headquartered in New York and London.

Wirbel worked with Mobilization for Survival in the American southwest on campaigns to end the mobile basing strategy for the MX missile, and to phase out Rocky Flats as a plutonium factory. His cover story on the National Security Agency for The Progressive magazine took a top Project Censored award in the early 1980s. A series on Reagan's Star Wars programs won a Scripps-Howard award in 1984, and in that same year, Wirbel had one of the first press interviews with NSA Director Lincoln Faurer.

In the 1990s, Wirbel developed studies on Buckley and Schriever bases for Citizens for Peace in Space, pointing out the bases' role in unilateralist strategies even prior to the publication of US Space Command's Vision for 2020 in 1996. He has written on joint NSA/NRO plans and on space unilateralism in features for Electronic Engineering Times, and has spoken on space militarization in the UK, Germany, and several US cities.

Product Details

• Paperback: 194 pages
• Publisher: Pluto Press (January 20, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0745321143
• ISBN-13: 978-0745321141
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.3 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,891,454 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A frightening picture of unprecedented power, December 26, 2004

By	Malvin (Frederick, MD USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

"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.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars It's a book about left-wing politics, not technology, April 24, 2008

By	Richard Ulrich (Fayetteville, AR) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.