Page:The Air Force Role In Developing International Outer Space Law (Terrill, 1999).djvu/60

 4. Consider bilateral efforts looking toward the design of such a system.

5. Further consider US policy concerning the scope of control and inspection required to assure that outer space could be used only for peaceful purposes, as well as the relationship of any such control arrangements to other aspects of arms agreements.

DOD shared joint responsibility with the State Department and NASA for these actions. When compared with NSC 5814/1, the OCB proposal "indicated a slight change of thinking, at least within the confines of NSC, that meant modification of space-for-peace policy along lines a little more favorable to the military" so that the military space program was no longer to be as small as possible.

Also in March 1959, Franklyn W. Phillips, acting secretary, National Aeronautics and Space Council (NASC), wrote to President Eisenhower supporting a State proposal that an NASC panel be established to study the technical feasibility of proposals on the use of space vehicles not equipped to inflict injury or damage. A few weeks later Phillips wrote to the secretary of defense and requested DOD appointments for an NASC panel to study such space vehicles. In a letter drafted by Benjamin Foreman, DOD's assistant general counsel for international affairs, Secretary Quarles responded to Phillips as follows:

It would appear desirable that the United States avoid making any unilateral policy statement binding only on the United States and which might conceivably limit or hamper its own freedom of action. Thus it is to the advantage of the United States that no legal restrictions on the use of outer space be established for at least a period of time sufficient to allow the United States to gain a fuller understanding of the spatial environment and to ascertain the extent to which other nations may want to use space to the disadvantage of the United States.

In a May 1959 thesis for the Industrial College of the Armed Forces (ICAF) entitled "Astronautical Law," Col Martin Menter from the Air