ECO-TERRORES - Pelted by paint, downed by debris: Missile defenses will put valuable satellites at even greater risk. [...]
We think of space as empty, but the space near Earth is littered with debris. More than 9,000 objects larger than 10 centimeters in diameter, nearly all manmade, are currently being tracked, and there are probably more than 100,000 pieces of orbiting debris larger than a marble. Yet the crowded near-Earth orbits inhabited by this debris are where the Bush administration wants to put certain parts of its proposed missile defense system - Space-Based Lasers and thousands of “Brilliant Pebbles” space-based interceptor missiles. These weapons were previously forbidden by the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, which the United States withdrew from in June.
Weaponization of space would make the debris problem much worse, and even one war in space could encase the entire planet in a shell of whizzing debris that would thereafter make space near the Earth highly hazardous for peaceful as well as military purposes.