JOURNAL ENTRY

Mitchell, Edgar D.

JOURNAL ENTRY Edgar D. Mitchell An Astronaut Against Star Wars Peace is not the absence of war. Peace begins not when nations are too invincible to be attacked, too bloodied to fight, or too...

...In a nuclear exchange, even with Star Wars, you could win the battle but lose the world...
...Only a few million pounds of debris, each no larger than a pebble, would make near-Earth orbit totally uninhabitable because of the collision hazard...
...As an astronaut, trained Navy fighter pilot, and Republican, I felt compelled to break publicly with the traditional nuclear establishment on the question of Star Wars...
...The soEdgar D. Mitchell was captain of the Apollo 14 spacecraft...
...From the time of my lunar mission, I have been vastly disturbed by the possibility that space technology would be put to military purposes...
...The debris from the first space war would preclude humans from experiencing, enjoying, and learning from near-Earth orbits...
...The technology that carried us to the moon for peaceful explorations of that diminutive planet was awesome...
...Peace is fundamentally a state of mind...
...Stoir Wars is total insanity...
...its destructive energy travels at the speed of light...
...Shooting down a swarm of incoming nuclear missiles would be like swatting a swarm of attacking killer bees...
...For me, this realization welled up from some deep source of awareness after I was privileged to see our fragile little planet from a distance of 240,000 miles...
...I also believe that Star Wars cannot possibly work...
...The space environment is even more fragile than the Earth environment...
...You might get a few, or even most, but the damage the remainder could inflict would be fatal...
...So when Ronald Reagan announced the Star Wars initiative, and when George Bush and Congress continue to fund it, I get angry: The traditional politicians and war strategists have invaded the arena of space—my arena—and they clearly do not understand, or ignore, the long-range implications of their actions...
...What's more, a laser weapon gives no warning time...
...The folly of using the new weapons to resolve human conflict was dramatically apparent to me from space...
...As one of the few humans who have experienced Earth and its environment from the vantage point of space, I am chagrined, indeed overwhelmed, by the shortsighted solutions of the traditional political and military leadership...
...He is chairman of the Advisory Board of the Institute for Security and Cooperation in Outer Space...
...But parallel to our peaceful exploration, indeed, even preceding it, the same technology was being forged into space weapons for use in the wars on Earth...
...There it was, rising from behind the moon, a magnificent blue and white haven for life, the only known repository of civilization in all the vastness of the universe...
...It adds a hair trigger to the weapons of global destruction and invites a nuclear first strike, for the only certain way to prevent an orbiting laser's use as an offensive weapon is to destroy it before it can be used...
...A beer can thrown carelessly along the highway will degrade and be covered over in a matter of years...
...Another compelling reason to oppose Star Wars is the environmental one...
...For the first time in the 5,000 years of recorded history, the human species had evolved sufficiently to break the bonds of gravitation, to explore space beyond its world...
...But quite often I found when people took time to listen to the arguments, they would realize the flawed thinking behind promoting space weapons as a form of enhancing security...
...We must discover planetary awareness, and an ethic compatible with it, or we will have no planet left...
...It can only begin when there is a profound desire to exist in harmony with oneself and one's neighbors, and a profound recognition that peace is the only sane alternative for Earth's future...
...Peace begins not when nations are too invincible to be attacked, too bloodied to fight, or too drained financially to build weapons...
...I could not be silent, despite the obstacles that would be thrown in my way...
...But a beer can in near-Earth orbit can float for centuries...
...No nation with the means to destroy the installation of such a weapon would sit still under the threat...
...For being outspoken, I received many a raised eyebrow, as my colleagues thought I was crazy to oppose the Government on this issue...
...Our weapons are now too awful to unleash on this little planet...
...The marriage of nuclear weapons to space vehicles begat, for the first time, destructive capability sufficient to destroy civilization as we know it...
...But beneath the blue and white canopy, a warlike species struggles incessantly to obtain a larger share of power and abundance...
...called defensive system becomes, in reality, an offensive system orbiting over the opponent's head...
...The issue to me is one of human evolution and survival—not national security...

Vol. 54 • December 1990 • No. 12


 
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