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 One
of the great arguments for selling the space programme to the American
People was that if they didn't conquer space, then someone else would
and that someone would use space to start lobbing atomic bombs back at
the Free World. Collier's magazine ran a major series on World
War III that warned of the danger of Soviet missile bases on the Moon
attacking a defenceless Earth, and the film Destination Moon
claimed that the Moon had to be conquered because the nation that
controls the Moon controls the world.
It wasn't just speculation either. Back in
the 1950s, the prospect of an atomic Pearl Harbour from space was
taken seriously by the Eisenhower administration and was one of the
reasons why the launch of Sputnik in 1957 was so harrowing. It
wasn't just that the Soviets had stolen a march on the West, but that
they might have gained the nuclear high ground first. |
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Artwork copyright©
Bonestell Space Art, used
with permission
At first glance, the idea of space-based weapons, whether on the Moon
or in Earth orbit, seems logical enough. The bomber had
revolutionised warfare; allowing armies to launch assaults out of
sight of one another and made cities vulnerable to massive attacks.
Space, by extension, should provide an even greater advantage.
Weapons could be set above their targets indefinitely and attacking
one's enemy would be like dropping stones down a well. By
contrast, attacking an orbital or lunar base would require fighting
against the full force of the Earth's gravity and the vagaries of the
weather. Fortunately, neither the Moon
nor Earth orbital bases turned out to offer any sort of advantage over
surface-based missiles, which could strike targets quickly and
accurately from silos or submarines yet were easily protected or
hidden. Moon bases, on the other hand, were easily targeted,
required very large rockets to deliver their bombs with any speed, and
an attack took many hours or even days to execute. Orbital bombs
were just as bad. Low orbiting bombs only passed over their
targets occasionally and predictably, and being over target in a
satellite is not like being in a bomber. The bomb still had to
be got to Earth and that meant either a rocket engine as large as that
of a surface-based missile or having your bomb spiral gently in with
all the delays and problems that involves. By 1967,
the military of the superpowers had reached the conclusion that though
space might be ideal for reconnaissance and communication, it was a
dud as a staging area for nuclear attack and a treaty was signed
banning nuclear weapons from a place where no one wanted to put them
anyway; rendering the opening space scenes of 2001: a Space Odyssey
with its orbital bombs obsolete before the prints even came back from
the chemists.
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