The simplest inevitability argument is that warfare and armaments are intrinsically uncontrollable because people are warlike: weapons and warfare abhor a vacuum, and will spread wherever humanity goes. This assertion is often accompanied by arguments that arms control never works, although it is possible to argue more narrowly that only space arms control is infeasible. This generalization is not far from the truth, yet it is far enough away that it should be considered invalid. For example, although the longstanding success of the 1957 treaty prohibiting military bases in Antarctica, often cited as an example of an effective sanctuary regime, would be more impressive if the signatory powers actually had strong incentives to establish bases on that continent, it still flies in the face of the idea that weaponization must always follow wherever people go (the argument that space weapons in particular will have military utility too great to resist is a different proposition from the contention that weapons always spread everywhere). Similarly, some types of weapons have fallen into disrepute over the last century, While they have not yet disappeared, chemical and biological weapons have been shunned by all but renegade states, and anti-personnel land mines are following in their wake. Many states that could easily have developed nuclear weapons have opted not to do so, in some cases in spite of apparently very good military reasons to go nuclear. Perhaps most strikingly of all, even among space weapons advocates one does not find voices arguing that the placement of nuclear weapons in orbit is inevitable based on the rule that weapons always spread. The fact that this has not happened is due to many factors other than the Outer Space Treaty's prohibition on such weaponization, but if some weapons do not necessarily follow wherever people go, the idea that a law of human nature requires that others will do so should not be seriously embraced as a basis for national policy.

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Mueller, Karl P. "Totem and Taboo: Depolarizing the Space Weaponization Debate." Astropolitics. Vol. 1, No. 13 (Summer 2003): 4-28. [ 3 quotes ]