RESEARCHING SPACE WAR IN NEW MEXICO

For many years a peace group in Albuquerque, New Mexico has been teaching and organizing in their community about the Star Wars issue. Led by activists Bob Anderson and Jeanne Pahls, the group called Stop the War Machine, has developed considerable expertise about plans to move the arms race into space.

Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque is a key Star Wars research and development facility. The base hosts the military's Directed Energy and Space Vehicles directorates. The combination of both is called the Phillips Research Site.

The year 2007 marked the 10th anniversary of the Air Force Research Laboratory's consolidation of all air, space, and cyberspace technologies under one umbrella.

In 2007 the Directed Energy program boasted that their scientists and engineers had continued "to improve the nation's ability to use directed energies, such as high-energy lasers, high-powered microwaves and to precisely project these directed energies at the speed of light anywhere, at any time to detect, track, and deter or use lethal force to destroy any threats to the U.S. and the Warfighter."

Translation: The Pentagon is making progress with their testing program to fire lasers from earth to space, through space, and from space to the planet below.

Also in 2007 the directorate claims they "successfully attained full transmitting capacity of 180 antenna elements with a radiating power of 3,600 kilowatts at their Alaska program called high frequency active auroral program (HAARP)." This directed energy project is one that is believed to be testing the capability to lift the earth's ionosphere to manipulate global communications and modify weather.

In their October 26, 2007 Kirtland AFB newspaper called Nucleus, the Air Force bragged that they were "Leading the world in research and development for supremacy in the cosmos.....The use of ground based, airborne, and space-based directed energy weapons will alter current and future defense and warfare concepts."

In addition to Kirtland AFB, Albuquerque is loaded with key aerospace weapons corporations that are making big money by supplying the workforce and technologies for space war. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon now have huge production facilities in the city and even the University of New Mexico has become militarized as many departments at the institution receive funding to help provide basic research for these classified weapons programs. The growing secrecy on a public campus has been a key issue that Stop the War Machine has campaigned against.

On February 11 the Global Network and Stop the War Machine will organize a protest in Albuquerque at the annual meeting of the Space Technology & Applications International Forum. This event brings military, aerospace industry, academia, and NASA together to promote the nuclearization and weaponization of space.

These war making centers are growing all over the U.S. and around the world. It is crucial that we teach others about what is happening in our communities and that we publicly protest this consuming drive to endless war.