War in Heaven

Publisher: The New Press (2007); ISBN: 978-1-59558-114-3

A revelatory look at the U.S. Government’s plan to put weapons in outer space, by two bestselling experts.

“During the early portion of the twenty-first century, space power will also evolve into a separate and equal medium of warfare … The emerging synergy of space superiority with land, sea, and air superiority will lead to Full Spectrum Dominance.” – from U.S. Space Command Vision for 2020

When most of us think about the potential of outer space for future generations, we think of world communications, satellite navigation, and scientific exploration. U.S. Space Command, however, thinks about weapons. Believing that conflict in space and wars fought from space are inevitable, the president has called on the agency to weaponize outer space and thus provoke an arms race that could cost the United States trillions of dollars and could lead to the demise of the human race.

In War in Heaven, a Nobel Prize-nominated peace activist and a former U.S. foreign service officer (who helped write the Outer Space Treaty of 1967) look at the history of military uses of space and the current plans for “militarizing the heavens,” including kinetic, laser, nuclear bombardment, and anti-satellite weapons. Contrary to the claims of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that the United States faces a “space Pearl Harbor,” Caldicott and Eisendrath show that the United States itself is today the principal obstruction to passage of an international treaty banning weapons from outer space.

At a time when plans to build and deploy space weapons are on the administration’s agenda but only just becoming known to the general public, this book will help launch a national discussion of a critical issue.

Reviews

Straight Magazine, 22 March 2007: Helen Caldicott (If You Love This Planet) has teamed up with former U.S. Foreign Service diplomat Craig Eisendrath … and if much of the material is familiar to Canadians wary of U.S. imperialism beyond the stratosphere … its call for peace among the stars is still depressingly unheard south of the 49th. The book is compelling, and its authors well-versed in the complexities of rocketry, missile-defence theory, and multilateral treaty making … read more.

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