| NEITHER STAR WARS NOR SANCTUARY Constraining the Military Uses of Space Michael E. O'Hanlon Strobe Talbot (Fwd.) Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2004 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-8157-6456-4 | ||||
| ISBN 0-8157-6456-1 | 173p. | HC/GSI | $? | |
| Page ix: | "In the jargon that Mike O'Hanlon understands so well (and, mercifully, avoids in his own prolific writing), while space is not 'weaponized' it is militarized." |
| This parenthetical comment from Strobe Talbot suggests that he has not read the book. Sorry, Strobe; "Mike" uses both these jargon terms — "militarized" on page 1, "weaponized" on page 8. |
| Pages 2-3: | "As time went on, both sides explicitly agreed not to interfere with the operations of each other's satellites in a number of arms control accords, including the 1972 ABM Treaty, the 1974 Threshold Test Ban Treaty, the 1976 Peaceful Nuclear Explosions Treaty, the 1979 SALT II Treaty, the 1990 multilateral CFE treaty, and the 1991 START accords. (They also signed the 1992 Open Skies Treaty, along with a couple dozen European countries, providing mechanisms for aerial monitoring under specific circumstances." |
| Given that the last two of these post-date the collapse of the USSR, I wonder which nations, explicitly, make up "the other side" in those cases. |
| Page 3: | "More than 5,000 [JDAM precision-strike weapons] were employed in the Afghanistan war of 2001-02, striking as close as five meters from their aim-points..." |
| As close as 16 feet, eh? If that was the maximum accuracy, I wonder what the average was... |
| Page 8: | "...it would also populate the Van Allen radiation belts with many more charged particles, which would destroy most low-Earth orbit satellites within about a month." |
| Capitalization. If this were naming the scientist who discovered those radiation belts — James van Allen — the upper-case "V" is incorrect. However, since it obviously refers to the specific belts named after that scientist, the proper form S/B "Van Allen Radiation Belts". |
| Page 8: | "...it would also populate the Van Allen radiation belts with many more charged particles, which would destroy most low-Earth orbit satellites within about a month." |
| Hyphens. Taken as printed, this implies there is a planet known as "low-Earth" around which these vulnerable satellites orbit. This of course is nonsensical; the phrase should be "low-Earth-orbit satellites". |
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