By Finian Cunningham

December 23, 2019 "Information Clearing House" -  In the following interview for Strategic Culture Foundation, American Professor Karl Grossman warns that the Trump administration is recklessly pushing ahead with long-held US plans to militarize outer space. This is in spite of a UN treaty banning such a development.

Grossman says the weaponization of space is essential to US imperialist ambitions for “full spectrum dominance” over the entire planet. He also contends that the US enterprise will unleash a new arms race with Russia and China, thereby gravely undermining global security and greatly increasing the risk of a nuclear war.

Much of the US space weaponization program, he says, can be traced back to the post-Second World War years when former Nazi rocket scientists were employed by Washington to continue the Third Reich’s military programs.

Grossman debunks oft-repeated claims made by US politicians that Russia and China are advancing their own space weaponry. Indeed, he points out, both Moscow and Beijing are on the record over many years calling for the US to desist from violating the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. The Space Force plan being rolled out by the Trump administration is largely being done without the US public’s knowledge or consent.

Karl Grossman’s biography includes being a full Professor of Journalism at the State University of New York/College at Old Westbury. He is also a film-maker, author and renowned international expert on space weaponization, having addressed UN conferences and other forums on the subject. He is a founding director (in 1992) of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space. Grossman is author of the ground-breaking book, ‘Weapons in Space’.

INTERVIEW

Question: The annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) currently going through the US Congress this month makes provision for the establishment of a Space Force as an entirely separate branch of the armed forces. Is the Trump administration moving ahead with plans to weaponize outer space in ways that far exceed similar plans seen under previous administrations, such as Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and his “Star Wars” initiative?

Karl Grossman: It is along the lines of US military space strategy that has been developing for decades. It is important, I believe, to note that much of this started with the arrival of former Nazi scientists – many of whom worked on the V2 rocket program, such as Werner von Braun – to the US after World War Two. At the Army arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, they produced a modified V2 renamed the Redstone, the first US missile capable of carrying a nuclear weapon.

Former General Walter Dornberger, who supervised work on the V2, was hired as a consultant to the US Air Force in 1947 and, notes the book ‘Arming the Heavens’ by State University of New York Professor Jack Manno, Dornberger “wrote a planning paper for his new employers. He projected a system of hundreds of nuclear-armed satellites all orbiting at different altitudes and angles, each capable of reentering the atmosphere on command from Earth to proceed to its target. The Air Force began early work on Dornberger’s idea under the acronym NABS (Nuclear Armed Bombardment Satellites).” Manno also writes: “Before a congressional hearing in 1958, Dornberger insisted that America’s top space priority ought to be to ‘conquer, occupy, keep and utilize space between the Earth and the moon.’”