Straight.com: Pax Americana delivers history lesson on weaponization of space

originally posted at Straight.com

by Travis Lupick

Nuclear weapons are frightening. The prospect of kinetic bombardment is even scarier. And if you believe the information presented in Pax Americana: The Weaponization of Space, it won’t be long before delivery systems capable of kinetic bombardment are orbiting Earth.

The concept is simple. Load a satellite up with rods of tungsten that can be fired down to the surface. Those projectiles would travel at an estimated 11,000 kilometres an hour and, with all of that energy, strike the planet with the force of an atomic bomb.

Even with a small network of such satellites, any target on Earth could be destroyed in less than 10 minutes of the press of a button.

In Pax Americana, which opens at the Vancity Theatre on Friday (June 4), director Denis Delestrac methodically presents publicly available information that should serve as a warning: the weaponization of space is happening and could end with a scenario not unlike the one outlined above.

“What is inevitable is that there is always going to be somebody who will want to dominate any territory,” Delestrac told the Straight in a telephone interview from Barcelona, where he is currently based. “That doesn’t make inevitable the fact that we can’t stop it.”

Which is what Pax Americana, Delestrac’s first feature-length film, is trying to do.

“The first step we need to take…is to inform and to get people to know what is happening,” the French-born writer and director said.

He explained that a handful of nations—primarily the United States, but China and others as well—are already far along in the process of weaponizing humankind’s final frontier, and that the public is largely unaware of this fact.

“It is called the Pax Americana, or the ‘American peace’,” a preacher delivering a sermon on a US military base says in the film. “It refers to the period in which American influence throughout the world has caused a relative peace to come about.”

Delestrac, who previously worked on the 2005 IMAX film Mystery of the Nile, said encountering that sort of attitude was an intriguing part of making the film.

“Some of the people who want to weaponize space really believe that if somebody has to dominate, then it has to be the US,” he said. “They have a good heart.”

The problem, Delestrac continued, is that moving militaries into space will likely bring consequences dangerous for the entire planet. As the film illustrates, a new arms race may already be under way.

Since former US president Ronald Reagan started the country’s “missile defence” program in 1983, the American government has spent $200 billion trying to figure out how to use satellites to shoot down projectiles launched from earthbound sites. In January 2007, China successfully destroyed one of its own satellites in a military exercise that caused international alarm. And Russia has vowed to destroy any weapon the US deploys in space.

Delestrac emphasized that all of this is happening just 100 kilometres above our heads.

“When the weapon is there,” he said, “there could always be a hand that could use the weapon not the way that it is supposed to—not to protect or not to defend, but to attack.”