MOSCOW. Aug 27 (Interfax-AVN) - The United States may deploy armaments in space in order to preserve its military and technical dominance, Academic Adviser of the Russian Academy of Engineering Sciences Yuri Zaitsev told Interfax-AVN on Thursday.
"In the opinion of American strategists, control over space will make the United States technically unreachable for other states and provide America with unquestionable military superiority," he said.
American generals accelerated their space projects in the beginning of this millennium, he said. The Pentagon formed a special commission in 2001, and the commission said it was necessary to protect American military and economic space systems from possible terrorist acts and assaults, the expert said.
President George W. Bush published a new national space policy in October 2006. The policy prioritized the strengthening of American leadership in national security projects in space.
The United States seeks the role of a policeman to regulate the orbiting community and to de-orbit satellites that fail to meet the American rules, he said.
Such policy is likely to cause asymmetric measures of Russia and other countries. They will invest much less to nullify the American military and civil dominance in space, Zaitsev said.
The creation of space weapons by other countries will be catastrophic for the United States, he said. "Telecommunications, navigation, banking and nearly every other sphere of high-tech America are related to space, let alone the space component of the armed forces, the missile forces, the Air Force and the Navy. The United States most heavily depends on space systems, so it will lose most in case of space hostilities," he said.
China and even the American allies with the exception of the UK will try to impede the deployment of U.S. weapons in space, Zaitsev said.