by Bruce Gagnon

The 1967 U.N. Outer Space Treaty prohibits ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in space or on ‘celestial bodies’ like the moon. Virtually all warfare on the planet is now directed by space technology.  Thus, filling up the increasingly limited parking spaces in various orbital regions will determine which nation has an advantage.

Anti-satellite weapons (ASAT) have been tested by India, US, Russia and China. ASAT’s need no explosives. At orbital speeds, kinetic energy — one thing smashing into the other— does the job.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX makes rockets and satellites to build Starlink, a roadband Internet system that once completed will cover the entire world. SpaceX has so far put 12,000 satellites into orbit and plans for 40,000 satellites in low-Earth orbit (LEO), occupying 80% of this space.

The Pentagon funds and tests Starlink for its military capabilities. Starlink satellites are being utilized by the Ukrainian military to communicate, as well as help guide drones, artillery shells, and missiles into Russian positions and at civilian targets. Very recently Musk has begun to slightly restrict the use of Starlink by the Ukrainian military as he feared that Russia might take action against the Starlink constellation.

In early 2023 China announced that it was preparing to launch close to 13,000 satellites into LEO in a move to counter Musk’s SpaceX network. China stated that they intend to: “ensure that our country has a place in low orbit; and prevent the Starlink constellation from excessively preempting low-orbit resources.”

NATO in 2019 announced a new doctrine calling space a ‘fifth operational domain’. NATO maintains that the US-led bloc will use commercial satellites as a military booster. Russia has issued a warning to the US-NATO that they are “exposing civilian space assets to potential attack by utilizing them for military purposes.”

In early February, Ukrainian troops fired rockets from a US-made HIMARS system which hit a hospital in Novoaydar, killing 14 Russian ethnics and injuring 24. Russia claimed that Kiev used western satellites operated by NATO personnel to target the hospital.

Currently, “weapons of selective destruction” fall outside of the Outer Space Treaty. Thus, a new treaty is urgently needed. Russia and China have been leading the effort at the UN to create a new treaty to ban all weapons in space for many years. But the US and Israel have been blocking such a step for peace in space. The official US line, through Republican and Democratic administrations, is “there is no problem in space, and no new treaty is needed.”

Bruce Gagnon is coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space and lives in Brunswick, Maine. 
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On January 24, 2023, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced they had moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock from 100 to 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been

by Nancy Price

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein and the University of Chicago scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project and the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Created two years later, the Doomsday Clock symbolically shows how close humanity is to the point of nuclear catastrophe. The clock was originally set at seven minutes to midnight. 

On January 24, 2023, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced they had moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock from 100 to 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to zero. This is “largely – though not exclusively – because of the mounting dangers of the war in Ukraine.” The press statement explained the four areas of concern for this new setting: nuclear risk; climate change; biological threats; and disruptive technologies. This was before war broke out in Israel/Palestine, threatening to engulf the Middle East in war. No doubt this will move the Doomsday Clock even closer to zero.

In "The Doomsday Clock Has Never Been So Close to Midnight: What’s on the other side?" Frida Berrigan includes the chronology of seventy-six years of the Doomsday Clock. Frida’s parents, “Elizabeth McAlister and Philip Berrigan, a former nun and priest: refused to pay “war taxes;” trespassed onto military installations to protest our world-ending ways; held vigils at weapons manufacturing plants; and protested during stockholder meetings of giant weapons-making corporations. They also took care of the victims of skewed US policies by organizing soup lines and opening their doors to the unhoused. Frida writes, “by reminding me of where
the hands on the Doomsday Clock stood at any moment, my dad helped me integrate concerns about nuclear weapons into my daily life.”

Time to Ban Nuclear Weapons
Nuclear arsenals are expected to grow over the coming decade, and these weapons are many times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. A single nuclear warhead could kill hundreds of thousands of people with devastating humanitarian and environmental consequences. Today, nine countries possess nuclear weapons: Russia; United States; China; France; the United Kingdom, Pakistan; India, Israel; and North Korea. They have a total of 12,700 nuclear warheads with 9,400 in active military stockpiles. Five other nations host nuclear weapons, and 27 endorse their use.

With the Ukraine-Russian war and threat of widening war in the Middle East, the danger of the tactical use of small nuclear weapons increases the risk they could be used by accident, intention, or miscalculation. Often described as “smaller” or “low-yield” weapons that would cause less damage, these bombs can have yields 20 times that of the one dropped on Hiroshima. See this page on the International Committee to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) site for more information.

ICAN, a coalition of non-governmental organizations in one hundred countries, works to stigmatize, prohibit, and eliminate nuclear weapons and supports the ratification of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). Their challenge is to build a global movement by getting politicians in the nuclear countries to sign ICAN's Parliamentary — or Legislative — Pledge supporting the TPNW, leading to all nuclear countries ratifying the TPNW.

The US and the other nuclear nations boycotted the TPNW negotiations and refused to sign. Nevertheless, the Treaty opened for signatures on September 20, 2017 and entered into force on January 22, 2022 after the fiftieth  ratification. There are currently 93 signatories, 69 states parties and 4 accessed countries.

Nancy Price is co-chair of the Alliance for Democracy.

​For a .pdf of this article, click here.

The social solidarity economy takes the best practices of our present system and transforms them to serve the welfare of the community.

by Jim Tarbell

An economy and culture of peace must be built on cooperation, mutual respect, and mutual aid. It needs solidarity support for a sustainable political/economic system respecting diversity, and promoting social and economic equity. The Global Network of Continental Networks Committed to the Promotion of Social Solidarity Economy (RIPESS) is establishing this economy around the world.

Social solidarity economy (SSE) participants from Latin America, the Caribbean, North America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Oceania shocked me at the Atlanta World Social Forum in 2007. They laid out a fully-formed and functioning alternative economy I had never heard of, even though I had been writing about economics and politics for forty years. They told tales of worker-owned businesses and co-op networks that utilize innovative and highly successful financial systems to support a world where the power of money nurtures healthy and sustainable socio-economic and environmental communities, instead of corporate profits and a bulging military-industrial colossus.

Paraphrasing their website: The Global SSE movement is emerging as a rapidly growing, transformative, citizen-led alternative to market-driven capitalism. It is aimed at systemic change, building an economy and society serving people and the planet. SSE is grounded in locally rooted initiatives that are increasingly globally networked, with a broad political (but not ideological) framework.

RIPESS members address the enormous, unaddressed, social and environmental costs generated by a capitalist, neoliberal economy based
on extractivism and unlimited growth of consumption and production. Today, more people are becoming aware that capitalism has turned our lives and planet into an environmentally unsustainable and socially unjust system, unable to guarantee happiness and dignified life conditions to all persons on the planet.

In SSE, ordinary people play an active role in shaping the social, cultural, political, and environmental dimensions of life. SSE exists in production, finance, distribution, retail, consumption and governance. It transforms the social and economic system to overcome all inequalities. SSE takes the best practices of our present system (such as efficiency, use of technology and knowledge) and transforms them to serve the welfare of the community.

SSE places people, communities and the environment above capital and its accumulation. It holds a world-wide vision with shared values
and principles based on reciprocity, solidarity, equity, self-determination, mutuality, cooperation; and human and Earth rights.

SSE's combined local and global scope gives RIPESS legitimacy to promote SSE, foster intercontinental cooperation, and advocate at different levels. RIPESS members believe in the importance of the globalization of solidarity, and the ability to build and strengthen an economy that places people and planet at the center of its activities.

It is the perfect model for moving from our war economy to a peace economy, where cooperation replaces competition, and solidarity replaces militarism. Check them out at www.ripess.org and join the effort.

Jim Tarbell is editor of the Alliance's journal, Justice Rising, and a founder of the GrassRoots Institute in Mendocino County, California.

You can download a .pdf of this article here.