Technocracy and Statecraft in the Space Age 1 02 1 



tees move slowly; space technology very quickly. Hence, increasingly prolific 

 technologies, far from engendering more complex laws, have revived the notion 

 of law as principle — a "revolutionary" jurisprudence in which the spirit, not the 

 letter, is of the essence. 



The Space Treaty banned national claims on celestial bodies and the orbiting of 

 weapons of mass destruction. It also established free access to space for all 

 nonaggressive purposes. Otherwise, technological and geopolitical exigencies have 

 suggested an essentially laissez faire regime for space. After initial Cold War 

 skirmishing, American and Soviet leaders recognized a common interest in 

 preventing undue United Nations constraints. American officials inside and outside 

 the Pentagon expressed a thesis not unlike that of Sir Eyre Crowe's Foreign Office 

 memorandum of 1907 re the German dreadnought challenge. Any nation, Crowe 

 wrote, would prefer to rule the waves itself but, failing that, would rather Britain 

 did so. Similarly, U.S. hegemony would safely uphold the freedom of space for all. 

 Soviet literature on strategic doctrine suggests a different analogy (itself first 

 proposed by Lyndon Johnson): as the Roman empire dominated the land by its 

 road system, the British empire the seas, and the American empire the air, so now 

 was outer space the decisive medium; whoever ruled it could dictate events on earth 

 as well.'^ Neither superpower showed an interest in the kind of multilateral controls 

 proposed at the United Nations. The only path toward detente in outer space was 

 cooperation among sovereigns. As fxjlitical scientist Don E. Kash noted in the 

 1960s, cooperation was a "God word, who could be against it?" Yet the sensitivity of 

 the technology for national military and economic interests circumscribed the 

 possibilities for cooperation among the United States, the Soviet Union, and the 

 Europeans. ^^ INTELSAT, the global consortium for communications satellites 

 founded in 1963, suggested to some that a technological determinism might 

 substitute for political will in forcing cooperation. By dint of cost and function, this 

 and other economic satellite systems (for example, earth resources surveyors) 

 required functional organizations transcending politics. But experience with inter- 

 national cooperation in space (or the deep sea bed) has not sustained the 

 functionalist hypothesis. INTELSAT was a house of discord until American 

 domination ended in 1971, and the international problem-solving that has oc- 

 curred did not spill over into other arenas of diplomacy.'^ 



The problems in INTELSAT were in part a phenomenon of uneven growth. 

 True cooperation is impossible when one state has a monopoly of technological 



Documents in the Lyndon B. Johnson Library reveal that Johnson borrowed this j^eopolitical synopsis 

 from his aide Cieorge Reedy. On Soviet perceptions of the strategic significance of space, sec Sav\ver, "The 

 Soviet Space Controversy"; and other works cited in note 23, above. 



^ On United States policy for space cooperation in the early years, see Arnold Fnitkin (chief of N.ASA othcc 

 for international atfairs), /rUfma/iona/ Coop<Ta/;on m Space (Englewood Cliffs, N.|., HIBfi); L'liilcil Stales Senate, 

 Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences, Interrmlional Cooperation for Outer Spiice. c<l Likiie (iailowav 

 (Washington, 196.5). Early critics of American "conservatism" in cooperation include Leonard t. Schwart/. 

 "When Is International Space Cooperation International?" BuWe/m of the Atomic Scienli\h (June I'ltiS), 12-IH, 

 and other articles; and Kash, The Politics of Space Cooperation (West Lafayette, Ind.. 1967), 10. 



On INTELSAT, See Jonathon Galloway, The Politics aiid Technology of Satellite Communications (Lexington, 

 Mass., 1972); Judith T. Kildow. INTELSAT. Policy-Makers' Dilemma (Lexington. Mass.. 1973); and Michael 

 Kinsley. Outer Space and Inner Sarutums: Government, Business, and Satellite Communicalwru (New York. 1976). 



