meets at the Palais des Nations in Geneva, has been the forum for discussion of these issues since 1985. National Missile Defense (NMD) With the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War defense spending was reduced and space research was chiefly focused on peaceful research. American military research is focused on a more modest goal of preventing the United States from being subject to nuclear blackmail or nuclear terrorism by a rogue state. This overlapped with militarization of space in the form of ballistic missile defense. Missile defense does not station weapons in space, but is designed to intercept incoming warheads at a very high altitude, which requires the interceptor to travel into space to achieve the intercept. These missiles can be land-based or sea-based, and most proposed programs use a mix of the two. On 16 December 2002, US President George W. Bush signed National Security Presidential Directive which outlined a plan to begin deployment of operational ballistic missile defense systems by 2004. The following day, the US formally requested from the UK and Denmark use of facilities in RAF Fylingdales, England and Thule, Greenland, respectively, as a part of the NMD Program. The administration continued to push the program, but received pushback from multiple fronts. Firstly, some scientists opposed the program and raised ethical objections. Secondly, some trial-and-error technical failures during development became highly publicized, though from a technical standpoint they were unsurprising and even expected. The projected cost of the program for the years 2004 to 2009 was 53 billion US dollars, making it the largest single line in The Pentagon's budget. See also References For a more complete account on the doctrinal precepts of acquisition of the high ground, ref Squadron Leader KK Nair, Spy satellites used for arms control monitoring Military globalization