Carol Rosin was then a corporate manager with Fairchild Industries, where she met Dr. Werner von Braun. Then dying of cancer, von Braun decided that Rosin was someone he could confide in. He began to relate to her what the military-industrial complex, of which both of them were part, planned to do in the years ahead. In Rosin’s words, he told her:
“You have to understand. … We have to prevent the weaponization of space. … There is a lie being told to everyone. … There are many enemies,” he said, “against whom we’re going to build this space-based weapons system,” the first of whom was the Russians….”
“Then there would be terrorists, then there would be third-world countries,” now we call them rogue nations, or nations of concern. “Then there would be asteroids. And then,” he would repeat to me, over and over, “The last card. The last card. The last card would be the extra-terrestrial threat.”
And now we hear in the news, today, just this week that they have slipped in another new enemy – only this time we’re going to protect our satellites. In other words, we have to have some reason to spend these trillions, to waste these dollars on a space-based weapons system. “And it’s all lies.” …
And these are the words that Werner von Braun told me in 1974 and I will testify before the Congress under oath about everything I have said. (1)
Rosin provided a second version of this story, which is important enough for us to review here. Here she brings in what she saw at Fairchild Industries as well as what von Braun told her:
When I was a corporate manager at Fairchild Industries in 1974 through 77, I met the late Dr. Werner von Braun, in early 74. At that time, von Braun was dying of cancer. But he assured me that he would live a few more years in order to tell me about the game that was being played, that game being the effort to weaponize space.
Von Braun’s purpose in life during the last years of his life, his dying years, was to educate the public and decision-makers about why space-based weapons are dumb, dangerous, de-stabilizing, too costly, unnecessary, unworkable, undesirable.
The strategy that Werner von Braun taught me was that first the Russians are going to be considered to be the enemy - in fact when I met him in 74 they were the enemy - the identified enemy. We were told that they had killer satellites. We were told that they were coming to get us and control us, the dirty commies, that whole story. First the Russians were the enemy against whom we were going to build space-based weapons.
In 1977, I was at a meeting in Fairchild Industries, in a conference room called “the War Room,” and in that room were a lot of charts on the wall, with enemies, identified enemies, names of people I had never heard of, names like Saddam Hussein and Khaddafi.
But we were talking then about terrorists, the potential terrorists. No one had ever talked about this before. But this was the next stage after the Russians against whom we were going to build space-based weapons – these terrorists.
This is 1977 and they were talking about creating a war in the Gulf region when there was $25 billion in the space-based weapons program that … had not [yet] been identified. It wasn’t called the Strategic Defence Initiative at least until 1983. This weapons system had obviously been going on for some time that I didn’t know anything about.
