LONDON – Space shoots off in all directions, and so it seems does U.S. Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, a long time aficionado of the subject. But not for him the dreamy, floating hotels of Richard Branson’s imagination. Rumsfeld’s intentions are on a grander, more intimidating, scale: to ensure that the U.S. militarily dominate not just the terrain of earth, not only the mighty ocean depths and the skies above but also the deep indigo of the weightless world beyond, and in so doing confirm in heavenly spades that no one will ever pull a fast one on the U.S., coming at it from the vast unknown.

After 22 years of work and $100 billion spent, and with the Pentagon still admitting that from an earth-based launch pad it cannot reliably destroy the threat of an incoming ballistic missile, it is difficult not to be amazed that the U.S. should want to up the technological and financial ante in this way. European diplomats are incredulous at the Pentagon’s sense of timing- to let this story come out just when the U.S. in engaged in delicate negotiations at the current review conference of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to try and persuade the world that the U.S. is truly interested in limiting the means of warfare. A senior Russian diplomat has said that if the U.S. goes ahead with this project Russia would have to react, possibly using force.

During the time of the Clinton Administration, Rumsfeld chaired two important commissions. The first, now well known, concluded that the threat of a ballistic missile attack was “evolving more rapidly” than had previously been thought. The second, which received much less press notice, was that the U.S. some day might face a “Space Pearl Harbor” with a sneak attack on all America’s precious communication satellites orbiting the earth. Space warfare had become “a virtual certainty”, Rumsfeld said at the time.

In his early days in office Rumsfeld argued publicly that the U.S. must develop “power projection in, from, and through space.” Then the issue dropped out of sight until last week’s reports. Naively perhaps, some of us had thought Rumsfeld, forced to do his sums in the era of the vast budget deficit, had come down to earth. Not a bit of it.

Space war has been a recurrent political theme since the fright America got when the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik in 1957. President Lyndon Johnson, not long after, said, “Out in space, there is the ultimate position- from which total control of the earth may be exercised”. President Ronald Reagan launched his Strategic Defense Initiative, the so-called “star wars”, meant to deploy space-based weapons to shoot down incoming missiles. He found his way blocked by a Democratic Congress.

But Reagan’s notion pales besides that of Rumsfeld’s. Rumsfeld has always talked of the need for America’s total domination of space. It must be large enough and so all encompassing, argued his report, that any counter measures by other countries would be quickly nullified.

This is the ultimate in American unilateralism. It will not only make enemies where they don’t exist, it will make friends in NATO wonder if they will be pressed to make up the alliance’s inevitable shortfall in more run-of-the-mill programs whilst American indulges itself in its space fantasies.

The Cold War with Russia is supposed to be over. China is presumed not to be an enemy. Israel, India and Pakistan are friends. So who is going to go behind America’s back and get organized for space warfare if America sits on its hands? As for North Korea and Iran why would they want, even if they could, to launch a nuclear missile attack on the U.S. when they would meet devastating retaliation? If anyone wants to do a nuclear 9/11 they will carry it in in a suitcase or run it in in a small boat or plane.

As for the offensive use of space, what is the point of such over-kill when all it adds is extra speed to the way the U.S. can bomb an enemy? Not one country is even attempting to match America’s overwhelming firepower as it now is. Russia has given up and China’s out of area programne remains very modest.

“Man’s reach must exceed his grasp, or what is heaven for?” wrote Robert Browning. But not in his wildest poetic imagination could he have imagined that a new earthly empire at the onset of the third millennium, full of its conquest of the Soviet Union and European communism, would be eyeing the total military control of space to ensure that no would-be enemy- one that everyone else believes doesn’t exist- would be out to creep up on America in the far beyond. But, it seems, it “doth work like madness in the brain” of Secretary Rumsfeld.