The Non-Proliferation Regime Is Over
On Jan. 11, a Chinese high-altitude satellite was destroyed while in orbit, in an action apparently taken by the Chinese themselves. There was much international speculation at the time about the import of this event, on which the Chinese government has not put out any official statements. Soon after, a raft of international protestations began to be expressed, especially from the United States and the Russians, who said, in part, that the Chinese were moving to militarize space.
What a fraud! In fact, it is the Cheney-Bush-Blair policy of aggressive imperial war which has put the world on the path to the militarization of space. More broadly, as Lyndon LaRouche commented on Feb. 2, Cheney and company have made the whole idea of "controlling" the spread of nuclear arsenals meaningless and obsolete in strategic practice. They have killed the Non-Proliferation regime.
It is not known at this point how the Chinese knocked down their own satellite. A high-level Indian military source told EIR that the Chinese test actually employed a laser beam weapon to destroy it. EIR has not been able to confirm this story, but has begun to put together a timeline of developments which show that the Chinese have been working on such a technological capability for quite some time. The public record shows that in September 2006, Chinese lasers blinded a U.S. surveillance satellite, an event that definitely caught the attention of the U.S. military.
We do not know whether the Chinese have demonstrated the basic principle of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which Lyndon LaRouche put on the international agenda approximately 30 years ago, and which President Ronald Reagan affirmed in his offer of March 23, 1983. What we do know is that we've come to the point where U.S. military and communications systems are vulnerable to the kind of attacks that LaRouche warned at that time would be coming. If the Chinese have not developed a laser-type anti-missile system, their actions show them moving in that direction.
This is not a question of the creation of a super-weapons system, or anything of the sort, but of a change in strategic approach, with shattering implications for U.S. scientific, economic, and military policy.
The first tragedy was that the Soviet Union, under the Andropov crowd, rejected the SDI proposal which LaRouche was discussing with them through a backchannel in 1982. The Soviets chose instead to stick with the non-proliferation framework of the 1960s, to which unfortunately the Russians are still clinging today. The second was that British agents like Henry Kissinger succeeded in turning the United States against the science-driver SDI policy which LaRouche had proposed, so that strategic defense with new physical principles is not a part of the U.S. military strategy today.
Instead, today's leading operatives for the British strategy, like Dick Cheney, have adopted an imperial war policy, which depends upon constant threats of military action, including the threat of nuclear targetting of China and Russia themselves. This threat of generalized war forces the potential victims to break from the Non-Proliferation regime, for their own survival.
It is time to return to the SDI policy, which, as defined by its author LaRouche, involves not only developing a anti-ballistic-missile defense based on new physical principles that would make nuclear weapons obsolete, but, much more importantly, redefines relations among nations to be one of sharing advanced technologies, in both the military and economic spheres. Contrary to all slanders, President Reagan specifically offered to share SDI technologies with the Soviets, and was still turned down. Like Cheney today, some political forces at the time were more afraid of peace, than they were of war.
What is clear now, is that the Cheney-Blair policy of intimidating nations into servitude is not going to work. The Chinese test, the Russian asymmetric warfare programs, and the work of scientists of many other nationalities, have ensured that the world is not going to stick with Non-Proliferation, and that the Cheney-Bush attempt to have a military monopoly in space won't be tolerated.
In sum, the strategic situation has changed, and the first step toward adapting to it couldn't be clearer: dump Cheney now!
