TECHNOIR by John Lasker Read Free Book Online Page B

are being spied on by NASA, the Air Force and the Brevard County Sheriff’s Department, which basically is a bunch of good ‘ole boys from near the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where Gagnon had often protested. He would soon find out this posse of spies had conducted background checks on him and his son. The spies were also monitoring the arms-control web site he ran, and attending Kennedy Space Center protests incognito; protests he had coordinated.
                Gagnon instincts, once again, had warned him right: There’s a lot of people out there who don’t think too highly of him or what he does. The 50-something Gagnon directs the
Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space
from his office in Maine. The Global Network’s aim is to stop all weapons, along with any nuclear powered technology, from ever being deployed past Earth’s atmosphere and into space. He established the Global Network in 1992, and today it is considered one of the fastest-growing peace activist groups across the globe. The Global Network has chapters in 170 countries. Gagnon’s resume also includes guest lectures at scores of high-profiled universities, and his writings have been published in prominent newspapers and magazines. He’s also a hero of sorts in parts of Europe and Japan.
                “We’re a small organization with meager resources,” said Gagnon from his Maine office during an interview for this book. “They feel threatened by us? That tells us something.” The ACLU filed a number of Freedom of Information seeking records that may reveal the entire scope of the government’s probe. “NASA states, in these documents, that they (also) have ‘confidential sources’ in Britain and Belgium monitoring Global Network activities,” said Florida ACLU attorney Kevin Aplin to this reporter.
                Why would the Pentagon, home to the world’s greatest and smartest warriors, be so interested in a small, bare-to-the-bones peace activist group? Force. “Space weapons,” says Gagnon, a veteran of the US Air Space is militarized with spy satellites, but space is not weaponized, for example, with “Battlesats” or killer satellites loaded with lasers or missiles. However, putting weapons in space, or creating weapons that can destroy targets in space, is the arms race for the 21st century, say experts. An arms race that was re-ignited by the Bush administration, China, and to a lesser degree, Russia. An arms race that has US aerospace industry drooling for more. Building constellations of Battlesats, for example, could mean hundreds-of-billions of dollars for the industry.
                It is believed that there are no weapons in space at the moment. But currently there are weapons on the ground that have the proven capability of taking out targets in space. Weapons that have already made aerospace giants such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing, and their executives, very, very rich.
                Putting weapons in space, however, is a considered a “Global Taboo” by scores of nations. Probably because many will never have the know-how or the money to  build such weapons to counter the US, China and Russia. For several decades now, the UN has tried to help broker anti-space weapons treaties. And during the 2000s, the US brushed them off. In fact, the Bush administration unilaterally withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty made with the former Soviet Union in 1972. The treaty’s intention was to limit missile defense, such as deploying anti-ICBM technology – Battlesats – in space. It was a brash and cocky move; one that some critics said flushed 36 years of other agreements on nuclear nonproliferation down the latrine. Then in 2005 the Bush administration voted to block a UN resolution to ban actual space weapons – it was the first time the US had voted that way. To the rest of the world, it sure as hell looked as if the US was going to