THE ROSIN-VON BRAUN AFFIDAVIT A STEP CLOSER? ~ hehe READ next article ???
For those of you who don't know what the Rosin-von Braun affidavit is, a bit of a review is in order. According to Dr. Rosin, during his final days, Dr. von Braun outlined to her a basic staged timetable of reasons that would be advanced for the weaponization of space. First, he said, the Communist-Soviet bloc would be the reason offered. Indeed, as events turned out, Ronald Reagan's famous Star Wars Strategic Defense Initiative program made public the USA's quest for anti-missile space-based defense systems since the 1950s. As many opined at the time however, basing x-ray and gamma-ray lasers in space might be construed as much as strategic offensive weaponry as defensive. Next, said von Braun, would be :"terrorists," after that, would come "nations of concern," such as Iran and North Korea. Indeed, again, the basic progress would seem to have been confirmed by 9/11 and the events following, and indeed, Iran is often cited as the reason for the American deployment of a missile defense system to Europe. Then, said von Braun, would come asteroids, and then finally, an extra-terrestrial threat.
As I've noted before, we seem to be entering the "asteroid phase" of the affidavit, as there are numerous television programs emphasizing the threat, and readers here will recall that Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev called for an asteroid defense system shortly before the Chelyabinsk meteor incident. Curiously, Medvedev also called for the use of nuclear and thermonuclear and "other" systems to blow up asteroids, leaving open the question of just what he meant by "other" weapons platforms.
Well, now it seems that a Danish company is working on a nuclear weapons delivery platform, at least according to the U.K.'s Daily Mail:
Real life Armageddon! Spacecraft carrying nuclear explosives could launch by the end of the decade to save Earth from asteroids
The article is crucial in several respects, not the least of which is in its reminder that the danger of asteroid impacts is very real. And that means, like it or not, that the necessity to develop weapons platforms that can deliver weapons of mass destruction to targets in deep space is also very real. The percentages may be small, perhaps even statistically improbable. But who wants to take the risk of not defending against them.
Which leads to the high octane speculation of the day, which may best be introduced by the question: ok, but why the talk of nuclear weapons and high velocity impact space delivery systems? For one thing, most people cannot think in terms of "other" kinds of weapons systems - to use Mr. Medvedev's term - capable of oblierating asteroids, than nuclear and (more properly speaking) thermonuclear weapons, though for those who have been tracking the development of exotic technologies, including exotic directed energy weapons systems, all the indicators are there that much deadlier systems probably exist, the stuff of science fiction perhaps.
So what is really going on? I suspect that part of the program here is simply to accustom the public to the weaponization of space with WMDs. Nuclear weapons are therefore, I suspect, the public nose of the camel poking through the crack in the door, but the camel is something else again.
The other problem is the international aspect, and here, I suspect, we are really looking at a program of hidden cooperation, as I suggested in my blog of two days ago about Russian-American space cooperation in spite of the tensions on Earth. In this case, add international scientific lobbying groups, Danish design firms, and so on, and one obtains the necessary lever by which an international military arm can be created to meet an international threat to the entire planet. And that in turn will require an international governance mechanism to control it.
Bottom line: this is one to watch, folks, and once again, it would seem that Dr. Carol Rosin, and her consistent maintaining that Dr. von Braun outlined this staged program of to her, seems to be increasingly vindicated. One may expect that this meme will be increasingly pushed, until it is time to invoke the next, and final, stage...
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