deliberately misinform the public about hazards and costs of SPS or to deliberately impugn the motivations of SPS advocates to such an extent as to make SPS politically impossible to implement. Such harassment, at the least, distracts SPS managers and workers from constructive efforts on the system, requiring them to respond publicly to the misinformation. If the SPS program were a purely civilian undertaking, none of the technical or operational details of the system would fall under military security classification. Nonetheless, the legal and operating entities for SPS will protect information about certain details of the system if knowledge of those details (e.g., the encryption algorithms used in the pilot beams from the rectennas to the power satellites) would make it easier to attack the system. Hostile interests may then be expected to resort to Espionage to obtain sensitive information of this kind. Because the international Resident Inspection Operation (RIO) would have unrestricted access to all phases of SPS operations and engineering designs from the inception of the DDT&E phase, hostile groups would be tempted to infiltrate RIO for both espionage and sabotage purposes. Elements of the SPS could be subject to shutdown by local or general strikes. The military implications of the sensitivity of the system to strikes would depend on the degree to which the production or operation of military systems becomes dependent on SPS hardware elements or on power from SPS. A further vulnerability of the space-based elements of the SPS should be discussed at this point. We noted in Section 3.3 that the 1967 Treaty on Principles allows any nation to place a satellite arbitrarily close to an SPS facility in space without the consent of the SPS owners, as long as their satellite does not directly interfere with the operations of the SPS facility. Suppose countries A and B (neither of which is aligned with the owner of a given SPS facility in space) have very poor relations with each other. Country A might then place one or more of its military satellites close to a power satellite, the LEO base, or the GEO base, in "sanctuary." Country B, presumably, would be reluctant to attack A’s military satellites in sanctuary for fear of damaging the adjacent SPS facilities and thus provoking the owning nation. Should open hostilities break out between A and B, such considerations may become secondary. Thus, the risk of damage to the SPS would have been increased by A’s action in seeking sanctuary.
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