Space Debris and Submarines: As If There Wasn’t Enough to Worry About

by Jim Washburn

With plenty of everything already going to hell, we’ve got two new worries this week: satellites colliding in space and two nuclear submarines bumping into each other under the sea. Just when I was beginning to adjust to the idea of jet-killing geese.

First we had the collision of an Iridium communications satellite with a defunct Soviet military one on Feb. 10. That was 3,000 pounds of combined stuff, only some of it radioactive, smacking into each other at nearly 30,000 miles per hour, creating tens of thousands of “debris shards,” any one of which has the capability to destroy other orbiting satellites, meaning that maybe you shouldn’t switch from cable for the next 10,000 years or so.

Experts who haven’t seen my yard are calling the space waste an “unprecedented debris field” that is now joining the already over 17,000 pieces of larger orbiting junk being tracked by the US military, and that’s not counting all those Cinco de Mayo bullets. Here’s an artist’s rendering of what this junk looks like:

It goes a long way towards explaining why we don’t get more visitors from other planets, because it makes earth look like a big cold germ.

I did mention that one of the satellites was a discarded military one, right? Another significant source of space debris was the Chinese military’s launch in Jan. 2007 of an anti-satellite missile, which intentionally went kablooey with one of their own satellites. Please note the word military again.

Next, but actually first, was the undersea collision of a British and a French nuclear submarine. Radio intercepts report the captains of both vessels shouting, “It’s two, two mints in one!”

Though not reported until Feb. 16, the accident occurred sometime around Feb. 4—only 204 years too late for the Battle of Trafalgar—but officials didn’t want us worrying our pretty little heads over two undersea nuclear-powered toboggans chock full of nuclear missiles going “bonk!” in the briny deep.

“The collision of two submarines, both with nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons onboard could have released vast amounts of radiation and scattered scores of nuclear weapons across the seaboard,” said spoilsport Kate Hudson of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (and evidently not the frequently topless Kate Hudson of You, Me and Dupree fame).

Though both submarines possess state of the art sonar gear, and both belong to member nations in NATO, which ostensibly coordinates its military activities, the two were unaware of their proximity to each other until it came to crunch time. Naval analyst Richard Cobbold gave this explanation to CNN: “Modern submarines are very, very quiet. In many types of water conditions, they might not hear the approach of another submarine.”

This, of course, is why our navy is busy driving marine mammals out of their mammalian minds with their new sonar tests, so they might better detect these less detectable submarines, just as we and other nations are spending billions to perfect even less detectable versions. We can’t allow a submarine gap, because Al Queda might get submarines, as soon as they can figure how to make one out of goats.

Need I say that these are military submarines? I make this point because the same Republicans who are pissing blood over the prospect of Obama spending a trillion dollars to fix schools, roads and bridges had no qualms about spending a trillion to blow up schools, roads and bridges in Iraq; patriots who questioned the patriotism of those who weren’t so gung-ho about killing a people who had never attacked us.

There are plenty of ways of looking at human history. Here’s one of them: The feudal lord on the hilltop nearest you tells you the feudal lord on the other hill is going to send his goons over in a pillaging frame of mind; you must needs pay tribute to your own feudal lord so that his goons can protect you. Feudal Lord Number 2 feeds the same line to his people, and it’s very groovy being a feudal lord, because everyone down the hill is working their asses off to enrich you, forever.

That model has undergone cosmetic changes to accommodate the planet’s shifting geopolitics, but it’s pretty much the same game. That’s why we entered this century with a military budget that’s the size of all other nations combined, and why it has grown hideously since then, due to this nation being attacked with box-cutters by what’s basically a wacko-Muslim version of the Crips. When the biggest expansion of our military since the second world war is in response to guys armed by Home Depot, something is seriously askew, and that’s “the disastrous rise of misplaced power” President Dwight Eisenhower warned us against in the “military-industrial complex” he saw growing in America.

Eisenhower raised that specter in his 1961 farewell address, but even eight years before that he had said, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

But what did he know; he only won World War II.

Our splendific military, and those of other nations, in their ideal state do nothing. They just sit there scaring other states. Then someone shoots an archduke or fabricates an attack in the Gulf of Tonkin and, whammo!, everyone goes all hammer and tongs on each other for a couple of years. Then they stop and exchange recipes.

Since the advent of the atomic bomb, there’s been a new wrinkle: that splendific militaries busy doing nothing can still have little accidents in their pants. A sub captain might miss a Crazy Ivan and suddenly one of the world’s already dwindling fisheries becomes an atomic cioppino. Or the space debris caused by a previous generation’s military shortsightedness results in our satellite-linked world going dark. That’d be a real boost to the economy.

When it becomes a question of whether our militaries are going to inadvertently blow us up before they bleed us dry, maybe it’s time to build more houses and fewer missiles.

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