But multiplying fiascos, fears, and losses were beginning to force America’s hand. Among them were the worsening prospects of the Vietnam War; the attempted invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961; two atmospheric US nuclear tests in July 1962 that interfered with radio transmissions, disabled several satellites, and contaminated four Midwestern states with radioactive iodine; and a plan by the Atomic Energy Commission to detonate up to six hydrogen bombs at the mouth of a valley on Alaska’s seacoast in order to create an instant artificial harbor.124 Add the humiliation of a Soviet citizen becoming the first human to orbit Earth. Add, too, the growing awareness that space debris and nuclear radiation posed enormous dangers to astronaut flights and orbiting satellites.
Soon after the Cuban Missile Crisis pushed the USA and USSR alarmingly close to nuclear war in the fall of 1962,125 the Soviet Union increased its retaliatory arsenal. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara glimpsed the possibility of “a more stable balance of terror.”126
Diplomatic work to address at least the testing of nuclear weapons—work that had been creeping along since the end of World War II—now rocketed ahead. On August 5, 1963, the Limited Test Ban Treaty was signed in Moscow by the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union. What the signatories agreed to was “to prohibit, to prevent, and not to carry out any nuclear weapon test explosion, or any other nuclear explosion . . . in the atmosphere; beyond its limits, including outer space; or under water.”127 Note the absence of a reference to explosions underground. Note also the phrase “any other nuclear explosion”: under the treaty, deadly explosions in space were verboten, but not the wherewithal to create those explosions.
A few weeks later, on September 19, the Soviet foreign minister told the UN General Assembly that “the placing into orbit of objects with nuclear weapons on board” must be banned and that his government was ready to sign an accord with the United States. The following day, Kennedy replied that, yes, the time to reach such an arrangement had arrived. On October 17, 1963, the General Assembly adopted Resolution 1884—sometimes called “Stationing Weapons of Mass Destruction in Outer Space” but officially named “Question of General and Complete Disarmament.” The resolution beseeched all nations to “refrain from placing in orbit around the earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction, installing such weapons on celestial bodies, or stationing such weapons in outer space in any other manner”—language that was carried forward into the Outer Space Treaty of 1967.128
Did the prolonged effort to ban deadly weapons from space mean that the United States stopped all R & D on such weapons during JFK’s presidency? No—in part because the Soviet Union had an aggressive space weapons program of its own, designed by Sergei Korolev: the FOBS, or Fractional Orbital Bombardment System, a long-range ballistic missile armed with a nuclear warhead. A FOBS would spend part of its time in a low polar orbit—the shortest path from Russia to America—undetected by US early-warning radar networks. It would then brake and discharge its warhead over the continental United States.129 As for the Kennedy-era space weapons program, both the Air Force and the Army designed nuclear-armed long-range ballistic missiles outfitted as satellite interceptors. They were to be ground-based, launched from Earth into space but not capable of entering Earth orbit. To some people, this distinction, like the one between offensive and defensive weapons, is elusive and artificial. But to the government of the United States, which repeatedly claimed the right to counteract aggression as well as the obligation to preserve space as a sanctuary, the distinction was fundamental.130
Lyndon Johnson did not need a crash course in space mavenry when he assumed the presidency on November 22, 1963, following Kennedy’s assassination. During the Eisenhower presidency, he had chaired the Senate’s Satellite and Missile Programs Subcommittee. During his own vice presidency, he had chaired the National Aeronautics and Space Council, as well as various other space and military committees. Johnson’s entire position might be summarized in ten of his own words: “we cannot be first on earth and second in space.”131 And his clout might be attested by the choice in 1961 of his home state of Texas for NASA’s Manned Spaceflight Center (now the Johnson Space Center) as the home of America’s astronaut corps and Mission Control.
Post-Sputnik, the idea that technological achievement is a straight shot to prestige and primacy among nations became a mantra. But prestige can also result from sharing the benefits of mastery, either through collaboration with equals or assistance to those in need. Johnson subscribed to both forms of sharing, and his concept of technological achievement included not just the mastery of space but also the practical applications of science in the service of civilization. He wanted cleaner air, more access to potable water, and fewer pesticides. While President Eisenhower had used Atoms for Peace132 and Project Plowshare133 to paper over the nuclear nightmare and his administration’s growing nuclear arsenal, President Johnson signed the Pesticide Control Act and launched Water for Peace.134
As for nuclear weapons and various other weapons of mass destruction, Johnson, like Kennedy, held that a ground-based weapons system was not a space weapon, even if the active life of the target and its ultimate destruction were to play out in the theater of space. The point was, our side required the means to defend against the other side’s space weapons, and we would mount that defense with weapons that did not live idly in orbit. That’s how you weaponize space without weaponizing space. By observing that guideline, the United States could maintain that it—unlike the dangerous other side, purportedly bent on “world domination”135—was honoring and preserving the serenity and sanctity of space. Once enshrined in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, this distinction between ground-based weapons and space-based weapons, however strained, kept the world marginally safer for a couple of decades, in ways similar to the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty or the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
Dating back to his days as a senator, Johnson wanted American military might to secure freedom the world over. While chair of the Senate’s Special Committee on Space and Astronautics during the lead-up to the passage of the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, he oversaw a committee report that proclaimed:
We have no intent to plant flags of conquest upon the planets or lay extensive claims to the stars. We do propose that space shall never become the route of march for tyrants and totalitarians and, as we have dedicated our resources in the past to maintain the freedom of the seas and security of the skies, so shall we dedicate our capacity to maintain the neutrality of space.136
Johnson’s opponent in the 1964 presidential election, Senator Barry Goldwater—a brigadier general in the Air Force Reserve and a man comfortable with the use of nuclear weapons—was not a fan of neutrality. In his view, space research should be directed by the military, “with national security and control of the access to space as primary goals.” What America needed ASAP were antimissile missiles, laser weapons (the laser itself had been invented by American scientists at Bell Labs just four years earlier), and a manned space station in near-Earth orbit. Daily surveillance of nearby space would be crucial. According to Goldwater, America had to “move beyond just sailing into space.” The idea that the United States could collaborate with the Soviet Union was “too ludicrous for comment.” Goldwater opposed disarmament. He voted against bills and treaties aimed at fostering peace. He thought that low-yield nuclear weapons should be used to defoliate key areas of South Vietnam and wanted senior military commanders to be preauthorized to use nuclear weapons in an emergency. Sounds extreme, but Goldwater was not an outlier. The president of the Aerospace Corporation demanded to know, “Why do we place an evil cast on military activities in space?” A senior airpower advocate and Reader’s Digest editor called the US space program too peaceable and “the wrong race with Russia.”137
Goldwater lost, overwhelmingly. Once elected, Johnson—an arm-twisting, New Deal kind of Democrat and as anti-Communist as his predeces
sors—presided over the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1964 Food Stamp Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the 1968 Fair Housing Act, all part of his “War on Poverty.” On his watch, Medicare and Medicaid were introduced, the federal minimum wage was increased, thirty-five national parks were established, and the National Endowment for the Arts and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting were created. Also on his watch, the country would witness the escalation of the Vietnam War, the ostracizing of Cuba by nearly every nation in Latin America, eruptions in America’s cities and on America’s campuses, and, shortly before the end of his term in office, the successful launch and return of the Apollo 8 spacecraft and its three-astronaut crew, who became the first humans ever to orbit the Moon—the first humans ever to leave Earth for another destination. Johnson halved the official poverty rate but also sent a million and a half Americans to Vietnam and convinced Congress to give him a wide berth to do whatever he deemed necessary in Southeast Asia. He further strengthened America’s thriving space program, and he pushed America farther down the path of substantive arms control, both on Earth and in outer space—not merely bans on testing nuclear weapons but prohibitions against using them at all.138
Under Johnson, the Air Force competed with the Army and the Navy to become the space power within the Pentagon, a fight for primacy that dated back to its formal split from the Army in 1947.139 Beginning in 1958, the Air Force faced an additional, civilian competitor: NASA.140 But putting a man on the Moon became NASA’s mandate, not the USAF’s—even though half the astronaut corps came from the Air Force—and Johnson was strongly committed to it, despite opposition from many quarters.141
Soon NASA’s outlays far surpassed the Pentagon’s space budget. In an attempt to swing the pendulum back, the military unsuccessfully stepped up its efforts to dominate America’s crewed space program, efforts doomed to fail because the president’s secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, was on the lookout for Pentagon programs that could be cut, not expanded. The race to reach the Moon had become the core of Johnsonian space policy, and NASA’s share of total space spending soared to 74 percent in 1965, with much of the remainder going to military reconnaissance satellites.142 But the largesse couldn’t last. For 1967, NASA requested five and a half billion dollars but received five. As James Clay Moltz writes:
[The] boom years for space could not go on forever. In domestic politics, Johnson’s Great Society programs in particular had caused social spending to soar. Even in peacetime, the simultaneous drains on the federal budget of space programs and expansive new social programs were bound to cause eventual fiscal strain. With the growing cost of the Vietnam War[,] cuts had to be made somewhere. . . . [D]ual pressures from liberals favoring more social spending and conservatives favoring more military spending began to catch NASA in a scissors.143
In keeping with Johnson’s (and Kennedy’s) vision of a single, broad, unified space program, the Vietnam War presented both the need and the opportunity for cooperation between NASA and the Pentagon. The title alone of a 1964 joint NASA/USAF document, highlighted in US Presidents and the Militarization of Space 1946–1967 by military historian Sean Kalic, makes clear the military benefits of open borders between military space and civilian space: “Summary of Suggestions by NASA Headquarters Personnel as to Ideas That May Have Application to the War in Southeast Asia.” Among the possibilities proposed by the co-authors were satellites that could identify “instantaneous cloud cover, synchronize altitude communication, and locate downed pilots” and research into “super-sensitive seismic sensors, lightweight power supplies, and infrared technology.”144 By the mid-1960s, infrared detection devices such as tank-mounted searchlights and the earliest handheld thermal imagers appeared in the American war against Communism in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
Off the battlefield, new varieties of danger to space assets were gaining visibility. Any and every spacecraft, military or civilian, US or Soviet, faced the possibility of collision with orbital debris. Thanks to the 1962 series of missile-launched American nuclear tests collectively called Operation Fishbowl, we learned that the brief electromagnetic pulse of a high-altitude nuclear test could temporarily paralyze unshielded communications and reconnaissance satellites, while the detonation’s longer-lasting radiation would suffuse the upper atmosphere and make human spaceflight even more problematic than it was already was. Down on the ground, even an unfueled rocket sitting on a launchpad could become a site of disaster: during an Apollo 1 launch rehearsal on January 27, 1967, three astronauts asphyxiated within seconds from an electrical spark gone wild, because the pure oxygen atmosphere in their sealed capsule spread fire instantly, igniting the interior nylon netting, the Velcro straps, and the polyurethane foam insulation.145
No thinking person imagines that being president of the United States, especially in wartime, is a job for the faint of heart. Johnson’s presidency, rife with tumult, was marked by a widely questioned war and social upheaval as well as pioneering safety-net programs and technological triumphs. Like his predecessors and successors, he walked both sides of the space street. Carrying on the postwar practice of US “technological anticommunism,” he promoted what Walter A. McDougall called the “benign hypocrisy [of] cooperation in science and competition in engineering.”146 Johnson’s support of cutting-edge military reconnaissance and his public acknowledgment of successful American ASAT tests served as accident insurance for peace initiatives. For him, national security demanded the presence of the military in space but the absence of orbiting weapons.
Just days after his sudden accession to the presidency, Johnson told the space industry that the United States would uphold its commitment to the “peaceful purpose of space for the good of all mankind.” The United States would have to appear to the world as the champion of peace so as to nudge the Soviet Union away from its work on bombardment satellites. One way to look peaceable would be to open previously military programs to general public use—the civilian spin-off argument. Two such programs were Transit, the US Navy’s satellite navigation system, and Nimbus, a system of NASA satellites that recorded and photographed cloud cover, atmospheric chemistry, ozone, and sea ice. Another way to look peaceable would be to keep supporting the kinds of cooperative scientific ventures that had started during International Geophysical Year and had continued under Kennedy—not the Moon landing program, which Johnson wanted to remain a unilateral first, but less high-profile programs such as satellite studies of Earth’s magnetic field, satellite relay of communications, and, as discussed by Soviet and US scientific delegations from December 1964 through September 1966, a joint civilian mission to space.147 A third way would be to press directly and conspicuously for a UN treaty on arms control in outer space.
By this point, contends Moltz, political leaders “had begun to recognize that space was now too valuable to be used for war.”148 In December 1963 the UN General Assembly adopted a declaration of principles affirming that “the exploration and use of outer space should be carried on for the betterment of mankind and for the benefit of States irrespective of their degree of economic or scientific development” and asserting the shared desire “to contribute to broad international co-operation in the scientific as well as in the legal aspects of exploration and use of outer space for peaceful purposes.”
The time was ripe for a full-fledged treaty. The pieces were in place.
And so, on the afternoon of January 27, 1967, in the East Room of the White House, US Secretary of State Dean Rusk, followed by UN Ambassador Arthur J. Goldberg representing the United States, UN Ambassador Sir Patrick Dean representing Great Britain, and finally UN Ambassador Anatoly F. Dobrynin representing the Soviet Union, put their signatures to the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies. Representatives of fifty-seven other nations then added their signatures, and President Johnson said a few words:
We have never succeeded in freeing
our planet from the implements of war. But if we cannot yet achieve this goal here on earth, we can at least keep the virus from spreading.
We can keep the ugly and wasteful weapons of mass destruction from contaminating space. And that is exactly what this treaty does.
This treaty means that the moon and our sister planets will serve only the purposes of peace and not of war.
It means that orbiting man-made satellites will remain free of nuclear weapons.
It means that astronaut and cosmonaut will meet someday on the surface of the moon as brothers and not as warriors for competing nationalities or ideologies.149
Today, five UN space treaties are in force, along with hundreds of resolutions, initiatives, conventions, reports, declarations of principles, and arms-control treaties that include language directly addressing space. Among the arms-control treaties are the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty (Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapon Tests in the Atmosphere, in Outer Space, and Under Water) and the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (Treaty Between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on the Limitation of Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems). While it was still in force, the ABM Treaty banned the development, testing, and deployment of widely distributed ballistic missile systems on land, in the seas, in the atmosphere, and in space. It also banned interference with the signatories’ “national technical means of verification,” which—though unspecified—meant satellite photography, aircraft overflights, and electronic and seismic monitoring. Many nations regarded the provisions as indirectly including a ban on space-based antisatellite weapons.150 Upon the Bush administration’s withdrawal from the treaty in 2002, that ban evaporated.
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