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Comment by wmf | Hacker News Reader

I think there's a consensus that orbital weapons are bad.

Even if they're defensive weapons only? I think Reagan's star wars program was cancelled only because the Russian threat was not as big anymore. Not because of weapons in space concerns.

FWIW only WMDs are really banned in space.

Democrats / Clinton shut down the original Star Wars program because they favored arms control (arguing Star Wars was illegal under the Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty)

That treaty expired in 2002 and then Elon went to Russia to buy some ICBMs...

They also shut down star wars because it relied on magic that didn't exist. Raegan was a big fan of big projects that didn't make technical sense (see also the SSC)

The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty was a Nixon-Brezhnev 1972 thing, albeit ratified by a Democratic Senate in the same year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Ballistic_Missile_Treaty

Yes Good recent discussion: https://carnegieendowment.org/2021/12/16/approaching-third-r...

Do "kill vehicles" that are only capable of destroying a few tens of square meters at best really illegal under the ballistic missile treaty?

> Even if they're defensive weapons only?

And how you are going to convince everyone else that they are "just" defensive weapons ?

Apparently Republicans are all for weapons in space...

https://www.science.org/content/article/decades-after-reagan...

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/nuclear-weapons-china-a...

Weapons are bad in general. The military, however, takes a practical view rather than a moral one, and will not limit themselves based on what is good and bad, but will arm themselves based on what is effective. This is why we can't have nice things.

I was thinking more like game theoretically bad.

They may be bad in some game theory way, I don't know the argument, but large groups of humans are very much not rational actors. The tendency is to oppose the enemy rather than to maximize gains or minimize losses.

The biggest CO2 polluter in the world is ... the US Military. What makes you think they won't clutter up space with weapons?

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