Notes of an S&T officer ACDA
In 1982 after my INR assignment, I took an assignment in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), which was not part of the State Department. ACDA was an independent agency created by President Kennedy in 1961; it was abolished in 1999. According to Wikipedia, its mission was to strengthen United States national security by “formulating, advocating, negotiating, implementing and verifying effective arms control, non-prolifertion, and disarmament policies, strategies, and agreements.” My responsibility was space arms control, for which I was supposed to contribute a section to an ACDA publication called an Arms Control Impact Statement; my section would primarily examine the Outer Space Treaty. As luck would have it, during my tour in ACDA, President Reagan announced his Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars missile defense plan, which, if it had been enacted, would probably have violated the Outer Space Treaty in a variety of ways.
Key provisions of the Outer Space Treaty include prohibiting nuclear weapons in space; limiting the use of the Moon and all other celestial bodies to peaceful purposes; establishing that space shall be freely explored and used by all nations; and precluding any country from claiming sovereignty over outer space or any celestial body. Although it forbids establishing military bases, testing weapons and conducting military maneuvers on celestial bodies, the treaty does not expressly ban all military activities in space, nor the establishment of military space forces or the placement of conventional weapons in space.
My section of the statement dealt primarily with anti-satellite weapons. Many of the SDI concepts involved stationing weapons in space to shoot down incoming missies, which was primarily dealt with by the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. The Arms Control Impact Statement had to be approved by other parts of the US Government. My biggest problem was getting approval from the Pentagon, where the main opposition to my pointing out potential arms control violations was led by the head of the Pentagon’s policy office, Richard Perle, my old nemesis from my tour in INR. It was a somewhat unfair fight, since he was an assistant secretary of defense, and the senior ACDA officers above me were Reagan political appointees. My original draft was watered down before final approval, but much of it was redacted in the unclassified version.
As the ACDA officer responsible for space affairs, I had other responsibilities. These included attending the National Security Council meeting in 1984, which named Gen. James Abrahamson as the head of the SDI organization. In 1982, I attended the UN UNISPACE II conference in Vienna, which dealt with international cooperation on space activities. I participated in the interagency group that in 1983 approved the purchase of spare Shuttle parts while the assembly line was still open. These parts were later used to build the Shuttle Endeavour after the Challenger disaster.
According to a New York Times article 1986:
The Rockwell International Corporation, the prime shuttle contractor, said it could deliver a new shuttle orbiter in a minimum of three years after it received the order. The cost for Rockwell’s part would be about $1.9 billion, which includes the money already spent on components. The engines and other components would bring the total cost to about $2.8 billion. Some Parts in Production
Rocco Petrone, president of Rockwell’s space division, said several basic parts of a new orbiter were already in production. These include the wings, mid-fuselage and crew module. They were ordered in 1983 as spares, in case of an accident, or as the building blocks for a fifth shuttle, which was contemplated at the time.
”We’re in pretty good shape,” Mr. Petrone said, noting that the mid-fuselage is now at the company’s assembly plant in Palmdale, Calif., and the wings are to be delivered in September.