By Nowhere Man, for NATO Watch
It is a project that nobody thought likely to see the light of day. A petition to the US administration in January to "secure resources and funding, and begin construction of a Death Star by 2016” fell on death ears. In an official reply, the White House said it “doesn't support blowing up planets” and determined that the financial, political and strategic implications of constructing an orbital space station with “a fundamental flaw that can be exploited by a one-man starship” was not in the United States' best interest. The statement added, “We don’t have a Death Star, but we do have a President who knows his way around a light sabre” [thought to be a euphemism for killer drones].
It was then announced that hundreds of Star Wars fans were seeking to build the Death Star and raised over £300,000 on crowd sourcing website Kickstarter. But this non-state initiative was labelled “amateur hour” by NATO spokesperson Mme. Avril Foulez, while others warned darkly of it being a covert attempt by Al Qaeda to obtain the super-weapon. The same NATO official also warned that China was already scouring e-bay for a second-hand Ukrainian Death Star.
To recap, the Death Star was the residence of evil dad Darth Vader in the original Star Wars trilogy. Apart from an unimportant design fault that left it vulnerable to a couple of missiles sent down a ventilation shaft, it was an awesome vision of Empire engineering.
Another NATO official speaking on condition of anonymity said, “The Death Star is needed in the light of continuing threats against the Earth, especially by emerging powers”. It was not clear if he was referring to human ‘emerging powers’ or those of an extra-terrestrial nature. Californian scientists have proposed that such a system could also be used to vaporise asteroids that threaten the Earth.
The head of NATO’s Emerging Space Security Challenges Division, added, ““The nearest Earth-like neighbour could be closer than we think. Six per cent of red dwarf stars are orbited by habitable planets. There are at least 75 billion such stars in our galaxy and ‘Earth2’ may only be 13 light years away. There is real danger of a widening capability gap with Earth2, so there is no time to wait… we must start building the Death Star now”.
In another twist to the story, the UK MoD announced that Prince Harry was ready and willing to pilot the NATO Death Star having clocked up many kill-hours on his X-Box Star Wars video game.
One of NATO’s headline Smart Defence projects—missile defence interceptors in Europe—is facing increasing uncertainty, so this project could provide a timely lifeline for transatlantic defence and aerospace manufacturers struggling to retain multi-billion profit lines. A European joint venture that combines EADS and BAE Systems is likely to lead the development project, despite recent unsuccessful efforts to merge the two companies. One EADS insider said: “A tie-up between EADS and BAE on the Death Star is unfinished business”. BAE said it had a “clear, well-defined strategy” for 2013 and beyond. “We do not comment on market rumour or speculation,” the company added. The deal could be worth between $20 and $850,000,000,000,000,000.
EADS insiders said the reason the BAE deal could be revived was because the industrial logic behind it remained sound. The UK government has already given conditional backing to the Death Star proposal and British MoD officials said it would be the perfect complement to the Trident nuclear deterrent and that both were eminently affordable. By “diverting some aid spending into the MoD budget and cutting just five per cent in the government’s welfare bill would be enough to provide the funding”, they said. French officials indicated Paris, which also backs the multinational project in principle, is also considering alternatives, including an EU Death Star or even an independent Étoile de Mort. When told of the proposal, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel just rolled her eyes and sighed.
No one from the EU External Action Service was available to comment.