An outer-space war of words escalates

Stumbling over words
The Washington Post summarized the policy in the first paragraph of its Oct. 18 story on the national space policy. The new policy, staff writer Marc Kaufman reported, “asserts a right to deny access to space to anyone ‘hostile to U.S. interests.’”

And that’s the way most of the world consequently reported it, usually in quotation marks, without most reporters ever reading the original document.

Here are some examples:

• An article by Lu Yousheng of the National Defense University’s Institute of Strategic Studies, published in Liaowang magazine in Beijing on Oct. 30, said that one of the policy’s "major points" is "wanting to prevent any state that is ‘hostile to U.S. interests’ from entering space."
• Moscow's Planeta TV said on Oct. 19: "America assumes the sole right to deny access to space to any country hostile to U.S. interests.... Any space project from whatever country must be examined by experts from the State Department and the Pentagon and only then will the States decide whether to let it go ahead or to launch a countermechanism.... Bush’s latest space initiative is in blatant contravention of the international ‘Outer Space Treaty’ the U.S. joined back in 1967."
• Yuri Karash of the Russian Academy of Cosmonautics said on Oct. 27 that the goal is "to prevent the use of space by countries which are ‘hostile’ toward the United States.... America vests itself with the right ‘to prevent the development’ in other states of those technologies, industries and infrastructure which could be used to deny the United States absolute freedom of action in space. Does that mean that it can ‘legally’ destroy Baikonur and Plesetsk cosmodromes? Does America think that it has the right to conduct a strike against any Russian enterprise, which even is not producing but in principle is only capable of developing or manufacturing weapons for the destruction of artificial Earth satellites?"
• Speaking at a space commercialization event in New Mexico, former Vice President Al Gore called the new policy "a very serious mistake" and denounced what he saw as a "hubristic" flaw: "We in the United States of America may claim that we alone can determine who goes into space and who doesn’t, what it’s used for and what it’s not used for, and we may claim it effectively as our own dominion to the exclusion, when we wish to exclude them, of all others." That was his interpretation of the policy.

This all sounds downright terrifying, especially since the unanimity of the comments create the impression of consensus. But the problem is, the wording of the Washington Post quotation is carelessly overwrought, and every subsequent citation of the story continued or even enhanced the misrepresentation.

The policy as reported doesn't talk about denying anyone access to space. Rather, the unclassified version, available on the Internet (PDF file), states that the United States will "preserve its rights, capabilities, and freedom of action in space. ... and deny, if necessary, adversaries the use of space capabilities hostile to U.S. interests."

Compare this to the Clinton-Gore policy document 10 years earlier: "...the United States will develop, operate, and maintain space control capabilities to ensure freedom of action in space and, if directed, deny such freedom of action to adversaries."

The key verb, "deny," is common to both policies, and neither policy is talking about denying access. That which is to be 'denied' is any hostile action by adversaries.

Putin and his military intelligence chiefs appear, with most of the rest of the world, to have fallen for the press misrepresentation of the policy, and with the accompanying commentaries by various experts that weapons testing in orbit could begin within a month, with operational deployment soon afterwards..And even though the orbital basing of nuclear weapons makes no sense, that too has been ‘in the papers’, and Putin seems to believe that, too.

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