ABSTRACT
In 1994, Lt Col Michael E. Baum wrote a short fictional article entitled “Defiling the Altar: The Weaponization of Space” published in the Airpower Journal that envisaged a scenario in which China, on December 7, 2001, delivers a space Pearl Harbor. In what is described in a fictitious New York Times headline introducing the article, the “worst policy failure in 70 years,” China launches a surprise attack on a variety of American space assets and thereby take away from the U.S. “the ultimate high ground – space” in their plan to reoccupy the disputed Spratly Islands. As the fictitious chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff explains in his testimony to a joint committee of the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence after the attack it was this high ground that had enabled the “dramatic victory in the Gulf” and that the U.S. had unfortunately taken the wrong lesson from this conflict by assuming that “we would always own the high ground of space and be able to depend upon our assets in space.” The chairman laments the fact that, in the 1990s, the U.S. chose to pursue a policy which “worshiped at the altar of the peaceful use of space,” instead of following the “visionaries” in the late 1980s and 1990s who would have admitted the eventual weaponization of space and proceeded accordingly to pursue offensive and defensive weapons technology “R&D programs to be able to do these things when we saw other countries developing these technologies.”
