An outer-space war of words escalates

Facing phantom frights
On a Moscow TV program on Oct. 19, veteran Soviet cosmonaut Georgiy Grechko expressed his negative view on the new U.S. policy. He declared: "It amounts to this — we, America, have the right to do whatever we like in space. And moreover, we have the right as well to limit activities by people we don’t like."

Since that’s not what the policy said, Grechko’s opinion is misinformed. And it’s not the first time — nor is it the first time such mistaken fears paved the way toward genuine dangers.

A quarter-century ago, the very same Grechko was making similar wild accusations of space war plans by the United States — that time, about the space shuttle. "We know that sights for laser weapons have already been tested on the first shuttle craft," he told a television interviewer. He asked American astronauts to pledge that "we will shake hands in space and not look at each other through gunsights, that we will not exchange laser blows but exchange information."

Grechko, as it turned out, had not dreamed up his accusation. He had probably read it in the Jan. 9, 1981 issue of Pravda, where a Tass correspondent in Washington referred to an earlier article in the Baltimore Sun and wrote, "One of the first tasks of the crew of the shuttle, after placement in earth orbit in March of this year, will be the testing of the reliability of an aiming device for a laser weapon."

After Columbia’s mission ended on April 14, the Soviet press reported as fact that the laser weapon aiming device had actually been tested.

But we can peel this rumor back layer by layer and deconstruct its origin. The original Baltimore Sun story (Jan. 7, 1981) was actually a Reuters dispatch that quoted "congressional sources" as saying that "one of the space shuttle’s early missions will be to test an aiming device for a space-based laser weapon." That "source" was probably an entry in the Congressional Record (Aug. 28, 1980) where a congressman had inserted (as so many do) a press article on the subject.

That story was an article in Inquiry magazine by journalist David Ritchie that referred to Pentagon plans for orbiting "a scaled-down version of Darth Vader’s Death Star" and added that the military "plans a laser test on one of the early shuttle missions." (The test, by the way, was a proposed experiment called Talon Gold, and it never occurred, neither on the first or any subsequent shuttle flight.)

Ritchie continued to publish alarming accusations about the U.S. space program. In his book titled "Spacewar: The Fascinating and Alarming History of the Military Uses of Outer Space," published in 1982, he declared: ''The Pentagon is now the virtual master of NASA in fact, if not in name.'' Ritchie also said the Department of Defense ''controls the shuttle.''

Such accusations struck a chord in Moscow, and the hard-line regime of former KGB Director Yuri Andropov saw a truly frightening development. The Soviet government came to the view that the United States was preparing a sneak nuclear attack in which the space shuttle would play a prominent role. Space experts began speaking broadly that American astronauts had ‘overflight rights’ across the Soviet Union only if "certain conditions" were observed.

Otherwise, they broadly hinted, they could treat a suspect shuttle just as they treated the lost Korean Air Lines passenger jet in 1983. And Moscow authorized the construction of armed orbital battle stations to enforce such prohibitions. ‘Skif’ was to carry a 1-megawatt carbon dioxide laser, and ‘Kaskad’ was to be armed with space-to-space missiles. A prototype battle station was launched into space in 1987, but by then Mikhail Gorbachev's reformist regime had realized the illusory nature of the original threat and had lost interest in such weapons.

Making the same mistake?
Amid what is starting to look like a 21st-century reprise of the original Moscow miscalculations, it’s too much to hope for the appearance of another Gorbachev. The Russians must be told, and told quickly and credibly, that the press accounts are inaccurate and unworthy of belief — and undeserving of counteraction.

Unfortunately, alarmist news stories are all too often the ‘spin of choice’ in general, and the preferred strategy in the case of domestic political infighting. But the threat of falsely sparking a genuine space weapons race through the cynical or just careless promulgation of myths of such an "arms race" is too high for business as usual, on Earth or in space. Launch the truth into orbit, and abort the myths — that’s the only safe trajectory.

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