A two-day conference on preventing the arms race in space finished on the United Nations HQ in Geneva today. It was jointly organized by Russia, China, the UNIDIR-UN Disarmament Problems Institute, and the Canadian-based Simons Center for disarmament and nonproliferation research.
The conference brought together more than a hundred experts from Russia, China, Canada and the USA, and spokesmen of governments and NGOs.
The conferees aimed to exchange opinions, come at a common stance on the space 'weaponized', and see how to rule out Star Wars and secure the space for civil use.
Russia does not mean, in the near future, to develop and manufacture weaponry for space basing, or station arsenals in space. At any rate, it will not be first to do so, reassured its government spokesmen.
Russia and China made an appeal to other nations to draft a document, within the UN Disarmament Conference, which would fill in gaps in the international space law. As things are now, that law does not make an essential ban on developing and stationing anti-satellite weaponry, and on anti-missile defense system and component R&D.
No weapons whatsoever base in space for today. However, an AMD program, whose start US President George W. Bush announced, 2001, envisages the use of an entire complex of anti-ABM arms, space-based included.
Back in 2002, Russia and China called the 65 UN Disarmament Conference countries to draft a treaty that would prevent space-based arsenals. The US stance on the issue remains vague to this day. As the United States said a few years ago, it does not recognize the danger. This is a matter of the distant future, so it is too early now to start whatever talks on it. Such is the American opinion.
But then, neither Russia nor China insists on negotiations. They merely propose to re-establish a Disarmament Conference ad hoc committee to prevent the arms race in space. Its efforts were suspended in 1994.
